Fast Beam Alignment for Millimeter Wave (mmWave) Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) Communications
Given massive available bandwidth at mmWave spectrum, mmWave has been considered as a key spectrum to use for multi-gigabit V2I communications. To compensate for higher path loss at mmWave bands, mmWave communications is realized via beamforming based directional transmissions, and the transmitters and receivers should keep their beams aligned to harness the benefits of mmWave communications. Due to hardware constraints at mmWave bands, this beam alignment is achieved via beam sweeping where the transmitters and receivers search over their beam spaces to find the best pair of beams for data transmissions. This beam sweeping process will be initiated either during an initial access and a handover for link establishment or when beam misalignment happens for link maintenance. Due to high mobility of vehicles, handover and beam misalignment happen frequently. If not properly managed, this beam sweeping process will incur very high communication overhead which is a roadblock in achieving multi-gigabit the V2I communications. In this project, we will develop fast beam alignment schemes tailored to mmWave based V2I communications, which enables multi-gigabit V2I connections.
Faculty
Research Fellows
