New Beam Tracking Technique for Millimeter Wave-band Communications

In this paper, we propose an efficient beam tracking method for mobility scenario in mmWave-band communications. When the position of the mobile changes in mobility scenario, the base-station needs to perform beam training frequently to track the time-varying channel, thereby spending significant resources for training beams. In order to reduce the training overhead, we propose a new beam training approach called “beam tracking” which exploits the continuous nature of time varying angle of departure (AoD) for beam selection. We show that transmission of only two training beams is enough to track the time-varying AoD at good accuracy. We derive the optimal selection of beam pair which minimizes Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for AoD estimation averaged over statistical distribution of the AoD. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed beam tracking scheme produces better AoD estimation than the conventional beam training protocol with less training overhead.