MmWave Beam Prediction with Situational Awareness: A Machine Learning Approach

Millimeter-wave communication is a challenge in the highly mobile vehicular context. Traditional beam training is inadequate in satisfying low overheads and latency. In this paper, we propose to combine machine learning tools and situational awareness to learn the beam information (power, optimal beam index, etc) from past observations. We consider forms of situational awareness that are specific to the vehicular setting including the locations of the receiver and the surrounding vehicles. We leverage regression models to predict the received power with different beam power quantizations. The result shows that situational awareness can largely improve the prediction accuracy and the model can achieve throughput with little performance loss with almost zero overhead.Comment: Accepted to the 19th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (Invited Paper

Limited by Capacity or Blockage? A Millimeter Wave Blockage Analysis

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems can provide high data rates but the system performance may degrade significantly due to mobile blockers and the user's own body. A high frequency of interruptions and long duration of blockage may degrade the quality of experience. For example, delays of more than about 10ms cause nausea to VR viewers. Macro-diversity of base stations (BSs) has been considered a promising solution where the user equipment (UE) can handover to other available BSs, if the current serving BS gets blocked. However, an analytical model for the frequency and duration of dynamic blockage events in this setting is largely unknown.In this paper, we consider an open park-like scenario and obtain closed-form expressions for the blockage probability, expected frequency and duration of blockage events using stochastic geometry. Our results indicate that the minimum density of BS that is required to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of AR/VR and other low latency applications is largely driven by blockage events rather than capacity requirements. Placing the BS at a greater height reduces the likelihood of blockage. We present a closed-form expression for the BS density-height trade-off that can be used for network planning.Comment: accepted for publication in ITC 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1807.0438

Millimeter Wave Line-of-Sight Blockage Analysis

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems can provide high data rates but the system performance may degrade significantly due to mobile blockers and the user's own body. A high frequency of interruptions and long duration of blockage may degrade the quality of experience. For example, delays of more than about 10ms cause nausea to VR viewers. Macro-diversity of base stations (BSs) has been considered a promising solution where the user equipment (UE) can handover to other available BSs, if the current serving BS gets blocked. However, an analytical model for the frequency and duration of dynamic blockage events in this setting is largely unknown. In this thesis, we consider an open park-like scenario and obtain closed-form expressions for the blockage probability, expected frequency and duration of blockage events using stochastic geometry. Our results indicate that the minimum density of BS that is required to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of AR/VR and other low latency applications is largely driven by blockage events rather than capacity requirements. Placing the BS at a greater height reduces the likelihood of blockage. We present a closed-form expression for the BS density-height trade-off that can be used for network planning.Comment: MS thesis submitted at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, May 201

The Impact of Mobile Blockers on Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) communication systems can provide high data rates, but the system performance may degrade significantly due to interruptions by mobile blockers such as humans or vehicles. A high frequency of interruptions and lengthy blockage durations will degrade the quality of the user's experience. A promising solution is to employ the macrodiversity of Base Stations (BSs), where the User Equipment (UE) can handover to other available BSs if the current serving BS gets blocked. However, an analytical model to evaluate the system performance of dynamic blockage events in this setting is unknown. In this paper, we develop a Line of Sight (LOS) dynamic blockage model and evaluate the probability, duration, and frequency of blockage events considering all the links to the UE which are not blocked by buildings or the user's own body. For a dense urban area, we also analyze the impact of non-LOS (NLOS) links on blockage events. Our results indicate that the minimum density of BS required to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) applications will be driven mainly by blockage and latency constraints, rather than coverage or capacity requirements.Comment: This paper earlier published on arxiv with a different name as: "Can Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems provide High Reliability and Low Latency? An analysis of the impact of Mobile Blockers." The paper is published at IEEE Journal in Selected Area of Communication (JSAC 2019). This current arxiv version also corrects Figure 3 and Figure 11(b) of the published JSAC versio