Instantaneous Beam Prediction Scheme against Link Blockage in mmWave Communications

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) bands formulate the standalone (SA) operation mode in the new radio (NR) access technology of 5G systems. These bands rely on beamforming architectures to aggregate antenna array gains that compensate for dynamic channel fluctuations and propagation impairments. However, beamforming results in directional transmission and reception, thus resulting in beam management challenges, foremost initial access, handover, and beam blockage recovery. Here, beam establishment and maintenance must feature ultra-low latencies in the control and data planes to meet network specifications and standardization. Presently, existing schemes rely on arrays redundancy, multi-connectivity, such as dual-beam and carrier aggregation, and out-of-band information. These schemes still suffer from prolonged recovery times and aggregated power consumption levels. Along these lines, this work proposes a fast beam restoration scheme based on deep learning in SA mmWave networks. Once the primary beam is blocked, it predicts alternative beam directions in the next time frame without any reliance on out-of-band information. The scheme adopts long short-term memory (LSTM) due to the robust memory structure, which uses past best beam observations. The scheme achieves near-instantaneous recovery times, i.e., maintaining communications sessions without resetting beam scanning procedures.