Reinforcement learning of millimeter wave beamforming tracking over COSMOS platform

Communication over large-bandwidth millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum bands can provide high data rate, through utilizing high-gain beamforming vectors (briefly, beams). Real-time tracking of such beams, which is needed for supporting mobile users, can be accomplished through developing machine learning (ML) models. While computer simulations were used to show the success of such ML models, experimental results are still limited. Consequently in this paper, we verify the effectiveness of mmWave beam tracking over the open-source COSMOS testbed. We particularly utilize a multi-armed bandit (MAB) scheme, which follows reinforcement learning (RL) approach. In our MAB-based beam tracking model, the beam selection is modeled as an action, while the reward of the algorithm is modeled through the link throughput. Experimental results, conducted over the 60-GHz COSMOS-based mobile platform, show that the MAB-based beam tracking learning model can achieve almost 92% throughput compared to the Genie-aided beams after a few learning samples.