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.