Beam adaptation using out-of-band signals for robust millimeter-wave communications

Millimeter-wave technology has proved to be one of the enabling technologies of the fifth generation of wireless networks. Despite the merits of the millimeter-wave spectrum, its directionality imposes more overhead on communication systems than the non-millimeter wave spectrum. In this paper, we reduce the overhead on communication system by using omnidirectional non-millimeter wave signal to find millimeter wave signal paths. We optimize the beam shape based on the paths that are discovered with the non-millimeter wave signal. The optimized beam is then used for communication in millimeter wave communication. We present experiments to show the conformity of the non-millimeter wave signal with millimeter wave signal in terms of discovered paths in various environments. Using the commercial off-the-shelf hardware, we validate the method of beam alignment over non-millimeter wave paths.