Millimeter Wave Beam Alignment: Large Deviations Analysis and Design Insights

In millimeter wave cellular communication, fast and reliable beam alignment via beam training is crucial to harvest sufficient beamforming gain for the subsequent data transmission. In this paper, we establish fundamental limits in beam-alignment performance under both the exhaustive search and the hierarchical search that adopts multi-resolution beamforming codebooks, accounting for time-domain training overhead. Specifically, we derive lower and upper bounds on the probability of misalignment for an arbitrary level in the hierarchical search, based on a single-path channel model. Using the method of large deviations, we characterize the decay rate functions of both bounds and show that the bounds coincide as the training sequence length goes large. We go on to characterize the asymptotic misalignment probability of both the hierarchical and exhaustive search, and show that the latter asymptotically outperforms the former, subject to the same training overhead and codebook resolution. We show via numerical results that this relative performance behavior holds in the non-asymptotic regime. Moreover, the exhaustive search is shown to achieve significantly higher worst-case spectrum efficiency than the hierarchical search, when the pre-beamforming signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is relatively low. This study hence implies that the exhaustive search is more effective for users situated further from base stations, as they tend to have low SNR.Comment: Author final manuscript, to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Special Issue on Millimeter Wave Communications for Future Mobile Networks, 2017 (corresponding author: Min Li

Transmitter Beam Selection in Millimeter-Wave MIMO with In-Band Position-Aiding

Emerging wireless communication systems will be characterized by a tight coupling between communication and positioning. This is particularly apparent in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communications, where devices use a large number of antennas, and the propagation is well described by geometric channel models. For mm-wave communications, initial access, consisting in the beam selection and alignment of two devices, is challenging and time consuming in the absence of location information. Conversely, accurate positioning relies on high-quality communication links with proper beam alignment. This paper studies this interaction and proposes a new position-aided transmitter beam selection protocol, which considers the problem of joint communication and positioning in scenarios with direct line-of-sight and scattering. Simulation results show significant reductions in latency with respect to a standard protocol