Leveraging Sensing at the Infrastructure for mmWave Communication

V2X communication in the mmWave band is one way to achieve high data rates for applications like infotainment, cooperative perception, augmented reality assisted driving, and so on. MmWave communication relies on large antenna arrays, and configuring these arrays poses high training overhead. In this article, we motivate the use of infrastructure mounted sensors (which will be part of future smart cities) to aid establishing and maintaining mmWave vehicular communication links. We provide numerical and measurement results to demonstrate that information from these infrastructure sensors reduces the mmWave array configuration overhead. Finally, we outline future research directions to help materialize the use of infrastructure sensors for mmWave communication.