Robust and High Throughput Beam Tracking for mmWave Communication Systems

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication has been considered as a promising communication system with large spectrum resource available. In mmWave communication systems, in order to overcome severe path-loss, beamforming technology is required to form narrow beam and generate high directional antenna gain. This will result in frequent beam handoff and severe link blockage, especially in mobile scenarios, and thus greatly impact the Quality of Experience (QoE). However, existing beam tracking schemes only pursue network throughput maximization without considering beam handoff and link robustness. To balance both performances, this paper proposes a robust beam tracking scheme in mmWave communication systems which takes account of both system throughput and handoff probability. It obtains optimal beam coverage to serve User Equipment (UE) with low beam handoff probability, and meanwhile provides high overall throughput. Simulation results show that the proposed robust beam tracking scheme can provide a higher throughput and a lower beam handoff probability than the other beam tracking schemes.