Robust Beam Management for Mobility in mmWave Systems

Proactive communication among vehicles and infrastructure units is an essential ingredient to enable fully autonomous driving. 5G NR is a candidate technology to power the technical and functional requirements for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, through enhanced resource allocation and usage of nunWave spectral channels. Beam acquisition and tracking is crucial for successful operation in mmWave V2X. Traditional beam sweep strategies to achieve beam alignment suffer, however, from large overhead and latency that renders them impractical to support mobility applications. In this paper, we explore robust communication for NR V2X. We argue that imposing a hierarchical structure at the sidelink through the election of a local node scheduler is important for efficient mobility management. We further focus on the feasibility of nimWave V2X, and present field measurement results that show that mmWave V2X are capable of achieving long ranges and are generally robust to blockage, even with a wide beam at the transmitter. Building on the measurement results, we discuss key beam management building blocks for mmWave V2X that take the antenna architecture, and the stringent mobility requirements into consideration, to achieve beam alignment.