BeamSurfer: Minimalist Beam Management of Mobile mm-Wave Devices

Management of narrow directional beams is critical for mm-wave communication systems. Translational or rotational motion the user can cause misalignment transmit and receive with base station losing track mobile. Reacquiring take about one second in 5G New Radio systems significantly impair performance applications, besides being energy intensive. It therefore important to manage continually maintain high received signal strength prevent outages. also be able recover from sudden but transient blockage caused by a hand face interposed Line-of-Sight (LoS) path. This work presents beam management protocol called BeamSurfer that targeted use case users walking indoors near station. designed minimalistic, employing only in-band information, not requiring knowledge such as location orientation mobile device any additional sensors. Evaluations under pedestrian mobility show 96% time it employs are within 3 dB what an omniscient Oracle would have chosen pair optimal transmit-receive LoS beams. recovers continuing control packet over pre-selected reflected path preserves time-synchronization station, which allows rapidly link soon unblocked.