,(((:LUHOHVV&RPPXQLFDWLRQVDQG1HWZRUNLQJ&RQIHUHQFH :&1&
Deep Learning-based Predictive Beam Management
for 5G mmWave Systems
Aliye Özge Kaya, Harish Viswanathan
2021 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) | 978-1-7281-9505-6/20/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/WCNC49053.2021.9417452
Nokia Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
Abstract—Periodic measurement reporting based beam man-
agement is not sufficiently agile for 5G New Radio (NR) and
comes with significant overhead that scales with the number
of beams and users. Furthermore, such an approach to beam
selection is unlikely to be sufficient to avoid signal blocking in
real world scenarios. We propose a method to accurately predict
in advance the best serving beams and transmission points as
users move through the network and thereby eliminate the need
for frequent measurement reporting. Our prediction approach
applies deep learning techniques similar to that used in Natural
Language Processing (NLP) for translation/sentence completion
tasks to the problem of predicting the best serving beams. The
proposed solution enables the network to proactively switch users
to new beams or cells to reduce blockage and handover related
interruptions especially in high mobility scenarios. We evaluate
our scheme in realistic scenarios using a new modeling technique
where computer vision is used to obtain mobility traces of users
from videos of live environments. We show significant benefits in
terms of measurement report overhead reduction and signal-to-
noise ratio enhancement through blockage prevention in several
scenarios.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Next generation base stations (gNB) will be connected to
one or more transmission reception points (TRP) that are
capable of transmitting beamformed signals based on a pre-
determined set of directional beam patterns called the beamset.
A TRP consists of a radio unit and an antenna panel capable
of forming the beams in the beamset, and TRPs connected
to a base station may be spatially distributed. Narrow beams
with significant beamforming gain are required to overcome
path loss and extend the coverage especially in mm wave,
which implies a large number of beams in the beamset to
cover a whole cell serving area. As users move through the
network, they frequently switch between beams, TRPs and
gNBs in order to receive the strongest possible signal [1],
[2]. To facilitate beam switching, the base station has to
periodically transmit using each of the beams in the beamset
reference signals in the form of synchronization signaling
blocks (SSB) or channel state information reference signals
(CSI-RS) that a user equipment (UE) can use to measure
the received signal quality on the different beams and report
the measurements to the base station for beam management.
Moreover, conveying information about the allocation of these
resources requires extra UE-specific radio resource control
(RRC) and medium-access control (MAC) signaling [3]. The
number of required time-frequency resources for reference
signals and the amount of uplink resources required to send
measurement reports from the UE pose an overhead problem
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with increasing number of beams and/or users for beam-based
NR systems [4]. Without sufficient number of measurement
reports frequently being fed back by the UE, signal blocking
may interrupt the service since the base station does not
know which beam of which TRP to switch transmission to
as the signal begins to degrade due to blocking. Between
two measurement reports, best serving beams could become
obsolete and cause a degradation in service quality, which may
not be remedied until a handover or beam switch following
the next measurement report. Thus, even if a user is less likely
to switch beams, frequent measurement reports are still ex-
changed to monitor the best beam. Exchange of measurement
reports cause both messaging overhead and wastage of the
time-frequency resources, degrading user throughput.
Our solution to this problem is to enable the gNB to predict
the next best serving beam for a UE and to proactively switch
beams without waiting for the next measurement report. Users
in vehicles and pedestrians follow paths defined by roads and
walkways. They do not move randomly and typically follow
social customs, for example, they do not run into each other,
they yield way to others, and often walk together [5]. In
computer vision, the task of trajectory prediction is viewed
as a sequence generation task to predict future trajectories
of objects based on their past positions. The authors of [5]
propose a long term short term memory (LSTM) deep learning
model, which can learn general human movement and predict
their future trajectories. This level of social intelligence has
been mostly ignored in wireless access systems, and the re-
source allocation algorithms are designed largely ignoring the
spatio-temporal aspects of user distributions or their mobility
patterns. On the other hand, there is a significant amount
of research on localization of individual users and use of
location and velocity information to provide better service
[6]. In particular, in mmWave bands, because of blocking and
reflections from structures even the UEs close to each other in
terms of physical location may be served by different beams,
TRPs or gNBs. Therefore, beam prediction should not rely
entirely on explicit localization.
The main contribution of this paper is a novel method for
beam management that relies on prediction of best serving
beams using a LSTM network. Rather than relying on physical
location, channel state information or angular spread informa-
tion the prediction is performed by treating the sequences of
beam indices as a sequence of letters or words in a language
thereby enabling the application of NLP techniques. We also
describe how in-field training can be performed to train the
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predictor. The second major contribution of this work is to
show how the prediction, even when is not highly accurate,
can be combined with measurement reports to operate the
system efficiently by using the prediction reliability metrics
obtained from the predictor. Hence our proposed method can
be applied to all scenarios independent of how predictable
the mobility patterns are. We evaluate our scheme in realistic
scenarios using a new modeling technique where computer
vision is used to obtain mobility traces of users from videos
of live environments and video frame by video frame ray
tracing is used to model the radio environment. We show
significant benefits of our approach in terms of measurement
report overhead reduction and blockage prevention in multiple
use cases.
We rely on a LSTM neural network approach to predict
the next best beams or sites to serve the users [5]. LSTM
is a recurrent neural network where the network is capable
of learning sequences of arbitrary length while limiting the
error propagation using gates. Sequence-to-sequence learning
is about training models to convert sequences from one
domain to another using an encoder and decoder [7]. The
encoder-decoder architecture is referred as autoencoder. The
encoder encodes and compresses sequence data step by step.
The output of the encoder, which is also an input to the
decoder, represents the input sequence as a fixed length vector.
The decoder interprets it for each step of the autoencoder.
LSTM auto-encoder architecture could be regarded as a data
compression algorithm with loss where the compression and
decompression functions are learned from examples rather
than being engineered with specifically designed algorithms.
The data driven encoding and decoding functions are designed
using neural networks.
There are many publications in the area of beam manage-
ment focusing on tracking beams. The reference [8] provides
an extensive overview of the recently proposed measurement
techniques for beam and mobility management in mmWave
cellular networks and their impact on standards. The authors
in [9] propose an angle domain hybrid precoding and channel
tracking method for mmWave massive MIMO system where
they utilize an ekinematic equation characterize the movement
of users and track user’s direction of arrival. In our work,
we use realistic traces extracted from videos for creating test
scenarios. The authors in [10] employ an analog architecture,
i.e. the base station uses a small number of radio frequency
chains to drive a large number of antenna elements and forms
the tracking beams in the analog domain. [11] uses machine
learning to predict channel states and to derive beamforming
vectors. Our approach is more practical since we assume grid
of beams as widely used by the current beam-based wireless
standards. The authors in [12] propose extracting the user
locations in high speed trains for beam tracking purposes.
We do not require explicit user localization for predicting
next likely beams. Our approach could easily be applied to
the high-speed train use case as well. The authors in [13]
propose an algorithm to prioritize the sectors where more users
are expected to be found according to previous experience.
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Although their approach is beneficial for UE discovery, it
would not work to mitigate blockages for specific UEs along
a path. The authors in [14] propose a deep learning approach
for coordinated beamforming using deep learning. The deep
learning model learns to predict the beamforming vectors at
cooperating base stations based on the pilot sequences. Our
approach is applicable for non-cooperating sites as well.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II we describe
the beam management problem and provide an overview of our
prediction-based solution. In Section III the neural network
architecture, training and inference procedures are described
in detail. Section IV showcases the usage and benefits of our
framework through simulations on two different scenarios. We
conclude with a summary in Section V.
II. P REDICTIVE BEAM MANAGEMENT
To enable beam management for a large number of beams,
5G radio access networks support hierarchical beam refine-
ment. First Level is SSB beams limited up to 64 within a
cell. These are transmitted periodically and used for initial
access by UE to establish connection to the base station.
At the second level, narrower refinement beams with SSB
beams as root beams are used to improve system performance.
For the purposes of beam refinement and tracking, the gNB
can configure CSI-RS resources, where each CSI-RS may
be sent on a different beam and direct the UE to provide
relevant measurement reports. With multiple TRPs in a rapidly
changing environment such as in a city with cars and people
moving, frequent reports from a large number of beams will
be required to overcome blocking.
During periodic reporting of the best beam index, each
UE sends at specified time intervals measurement reports that
include reference signal received power (RSRP) and identifiers
of the measured beams. As illustrated in Figure 1 the reported
best beam is used by the gNB until the next measurement
report. The gNB typically picks the strongest beam reported by
the UE as the serving beam. That limits the agility of the gNB
to react to changes in signal quality especially, if a beam pair
is rapidly blocked and there is no sufficient time for regular
beam adjustment. Each time the measured RSRP is below a
configured value a beam failure instance is declared by the UE.
If the number of such instances exceeds a configured value,
the UE declares beams failure and initiates the beam recovery
procedure to find a new beam pair where the connectivity
could be restored [15]. However, this process will result in
service interruption or increased latency for packet delivery
and lowered throughput. By predicting the next beams, TRPs
or gNBs to serve a UE we can be avoid beam and radio link
failures and save on time and frequency resources needed for
recovery.
The essence of our work is to use an LSTM autoencoder
network to learn the features of the beam space, the environ-
ment and the user mobility pattern. The only data the gNB
needs to accumulate is the serving beam index reports which
are already available at gNB for each UE being served. The
beams across gNBs need to be labeled with non-overlapping
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Fig. 1. Periodic Measurement Reporting: The best beam is used by the
gNB until the next measurement report. Therefore, the gNB may not react to
blockages between measurement reports with agility.
Fig. 2. We label beams at different TRPs with non-overlapping beam indexes
indexes. Figure 2 shows a representative scenario. Users are
likely to move on similar paths again and again at varying
speeds in different directions. They will go through similar
sequences of beams as they move through the network. The
crossing in the figure is being served by two TRPs forming
many narrow beams. We label the beams with non-overlapping
indices across all TRPs.
When the user first becomes active in the cell, it is not
possible to immediately start the prediction of the best serving
beams. There is an initial period when periodic measurement
reporting is utilized to collect the sequence of serving beams.
Once a sufficiently long history is generated, the prediction is
turned on and the reporting mechanism is modified to reduce
the overhead. Once the required history length is available,
the scheme predicts the next best beam at periodic intervals
at a frequency that is much higher than that of the measure-
ment reporting. In other words, the measurement reporting
frequency is reduced once the prediction is triggered. The
predicted sequence of beams is matched against the periodic
reports to ensure that the prediction is accurate. The predicted
beams themselves are then used as input to the predictor. We
define the best beam prediction accuracy as the proportion of
time slots in which the predicted beam with highest probability
for a slot is the best beam to serve the user in that slot. We
assume that only a single beam serves a user in each slot. Best
beam prediction accuracy depends strongly on user mobility
patterns which can change rapidly. The beam management
scheme should be robust against sudden changes in prediction
accuracy. Hence in the proposed beam management scheme,
the output of neural network is not only designed to predict
the beam index of the next best beam but also the probability
of each possible beam. If highest probability value falls below
a threshold, then the result of the prediction is a set of K most
likely beams rather than a single best beam, so that the sum
of probabilities across the K beams exceeds the threshold. In
such a case, an on-demand measurement report is triggered
to obtain from the UE the RSRP value and the indication
of best beam from among the set of K beams. With this
approach, the beam management scheme automatically obtains
more feedback from the UEs whose next best beams are less
predictable resulting in an overall reduction in overhead.
Figure 3 illustrates the above scheme incorporating the
prediction, showing a reduction in the reporting. Based on
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Fig. 3. Algorithm utilizing predictions while enforcing a minimum signal-to-
noise ratio (SNR) threshold and monitoring reliability of prediction
a given history of size P we predict beams for the next F
slots. If the performance (based on traditional short time scale
channel quality indicator feedback) with the predicted beams
is above a threshold, we append those beams to the past
beam sequence which we refer to as history. Based on the
updated history we predict beams for the next F beams. If the
probabilities of individual beams are not above the threshold to
be declared reliable, top K best beams are predicted. The gNB
configures CSI-RS measurement at resources corresponding to
those K beams. For K = 2, namely for Top-2 prediction, at
each slot the UE measures the resources corresponding to the
most likely K beams and sends beam selection report. If Top-
K predictions are unreliable and serving beams are yielding
signal levels below a threshold we fall back to conventional
frequent measurement reporting mode until a new history is
built.
Note that if the beam sequence predicted involves a tran-
sition to a beam from a different TRP, then the gNB can
trigger the change in TRP. The prediction procedure can also
be used for handover prediction by treating each neighboring
base station as a single unique beam that UEs transition to.
When the prediction result is a transition to one of these
beams representing neighboring base stations, then handover
procedure may be triggered to the corresponding neighboring
gNB.
III. D EEP LEARNING - BASED PREDICTION SYSTEM
In the following subsections we explain the details of the
prediction system starting with the structure of the neural
network, followed by the steps for data generation, training
and inference.
A. LSTM Autoencoder
An LSTM autoencoder architecture is used to learn the
features of the beamspace, environment and the user mobility
pattern. Figure 6 depicts the process of performing sequence
to sequence prediction with the autoencoder, which consists
of two LSTM cells one for encoding and one for decoding.
The first LSTM cell, which is the encoder, processes the input
sequence and returns its own internal state. The state variables
of encoder are fed to the decoder. The neural network is trained
to predict the next beam in the beam sequence given the
sequence of previous beam indexes. The training methodology
that we use where the target sequence is the same sequence
as the input except one step into the future is called teacher
forcing [16]. Effectively, the decoder learns to create beam
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Fig. 4. The LSTM autoencoder consists of two LSTM cells and a dense
layer. Each LSTM layer has 16896 parameters. The dense layer has 3267
parameters. It takes 2 ms to train a batch of 128 samples with CPU resources
(10 x I9-7900X 3.30GHz@4.30 GHz 128 GB Memory)
indices starting from n+1 conditioned on indices up to current
index n.
Once the training is completed the autoencoder is run in
inference mode where the beam indices used previously are
fed into the autoencoder and next set of beams are predicted.
In the inference mode, the input sequence of size P is encoded
into the state vector output of the encoder. The state vectors
and the target sequence are fed to the decoder. The decoder
predicts the probabilities of each beam to be the next. The
predicted beam sequence is appended to the target sequence.
This process is repeated until F future beams are predicted.
The LSTM autoencoder which is used for predictions con-
sists of two LSTM cells and a dense layer. Figure 4 shows the
specific structure and parameters of the LSTM autoencoder.
Each input beam index integer value is encoded as a binary
vector that is all zero values except the beam index. This step
is called one-hot-encoding. The input sequence is the sequence
of one-hot-encoded vectors which are fed into the input layer
labeled by input1 . Since we have N = 99 possible beams,
each one-hot-encoded vector is of size 99. The auto-encoder
consists of two LSTM cells of size 32 which are denoted in
Figure 4 as lstm1 and lstm2 . The output of the decoder dense
layer is a vector where each entry is the probability of each
beam being the next determined using a SoftMax function. The
index corresponding to the highest probability is deemed as the
most likely beam, the index of the second highest probability
is deemed as the second most likely beam and so on.
B. Generating Beam Sequences
When gNBs are first deployed, they are operated in training
mode where beam refinement procedures are implemented
with traditional CSI-reporting configuration. During this time,
each user device is asked to report substantial number of
measurement reports for estimating the quality of different
beams. Training mode could also be triggered if substantial
changes are made to the antenna orientation or to the infras-
tructure such as major new building or road construction in
the neighborhood.
In training mode, gNB configures UEs to measure specific,
likely beams or all available beams. These reports are used
directly to determine the best beam to serve the user during
the training phase. The sequence of beams used by the UEs
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Fig. 5. Training
are captured and stored in gNB memory along with their
time stamps. During the training phase there may be some
non-optimal sequences of beams, e.g., the best beams may
be blocked soon after switching to that beam and radio link
failures may occur. So, training data can be constructed by
using the sequence of beam indexes with good signal quality
and suppressing intermediate beam indices with very poor
signal strength and short dwell times. Therefore, the gNB
may select an actual beam sequence that served the UE for a
given period without any outage or construct a training beam
sequence from measurement reports ignoring beam switching
triggered with a gain below a threshold or followed by another
beam switch within a very short dwell time.
The beam sequences are interpolated to have an index for
equidistant time intervals e.g every 10 ms which we refer as a
slot. If the data in the memory does not include a beam index
for each 10 ms sampling interval, then the previous beam may
be repeated, for example, because the same beam may be used
for a period of time over multiple 10 ms intervals. Through
such interpolation and processing of real beam sequences we
construct for each UE a beam sequence sampled at constant
time intervals for training the predictor.
After a beam sequence of an arbitrary length is constructed,
we create samples of length P + F consisting of a first portion
of P beam indices, and a second portion of future F beam
indexes as the correct output for training. Consider a past
sequence of 600 ms. At 10 ms sampling rate, the past sequence
would consist of P = 60 slots. If we want to predict 40 ms
ahead, the future samples will be of size F = 4 slots. Figure 5
illustrates the neural network training steps. The past samples
collected from all UEs are fed in batches to the neural network.
The prediction of the neural network is compared with the
correct future samples. The parameters of the neural network
are adjusted to minimize the error between predictions and
ground truth. We use categorical cross entropy function as
defined in (1) where each unique beam index is treated as a
category. In (1) F is the number of samples to be predicted, C
is the number of unique beam index categories , 1yi∈Cc is the
indicator function of the ith prediction belonging to the cth
category. pmodel [yi ∈ Cc ] is the probability predicted by the
model for the ith observation to belong to the cth category.
1 
F C
− 1γ ∈C log Pmodel [γi ∈ Cc ] (1)
F i=1 c=1 i c
The process of tuning the neural network parameters based
on a set of training samples may be repeated for many training
samples for many UEs, in order to train the beam sequence
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Fig. 6. Inference with autoencoder
model to provide an accurate prediction. Training with the
entire user population’s past experiences improve prediction
accuracy for current individual users.
C. Algorithm utilizing predictions
The capability of predicting the next beams to serve the
user improves the effective measurement reporting frequency
by relying on predictions as long as reliable. The histories are
updated with predicted beam indexes which may not always
be correct. Predictions based on the imperfect histories will
get less reliable over time and the histories will be needed to
bootstrapped with data from infrequent measurement reports.
The output of the decoder is the probabilities of each beam.
Based on the probability of a beam and percentage of the
correct prediction of beams using inferences based on the
similar probabilities we define the reliability of the beam. As
an example, if the predicted probability is 0.6 but only the
90% of predictions with the probability 0.6 are correct, we
define the reliability of the beam as 90%.
Let’s define bc as the index of the serving beam, RSRPthr
the minimum RSRP to be maintained, rmin , smin the required
reliability of the most and second likely beam and K the
prediction window. At time i = 0, prediction starts if the
history H has the sufficient length and predict based on this
history the next most likely beam. If the reliability of the
beam prediction is greater than rmin as determined by the
probability of the predicted beam by the output layer of the
predictor, the serving beam bc is set to be the predicted beam
bi .
If the bc meets the RSRP threshold the history is updated
using bc otherwise a full report is requested. If the reliability
of the most likely beam is not enough but the second most
likely beam is reliable, gNB requests measurement reports for
only those two beams and the UE switches to the best one if
the RSRP requirement is met. That requires significantly less
resources than probing all possible beams.
IV. R ESULTS
We show the benefits of beam prediction based on the ray-
tracing results obtained in two realistic scenarios involving
pedestrian and vehicular mobility. The results presented in
Section IV-A are for a college intersection with pedestrians
who are mostly bikers. The results presented in Section IV-B
are for vehicular users on a busy road with many lanes and
intersections.
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Fig. 7. People detected with computer vision algorithms on a single frame
of a video (left) and entire trajectories extracted from a video overlayed on
top of each other (right).
Fig. 8. 3D ray tracing model for a sample frame. At each frame a new ray
tracing model is generated to model the moving blockages.
A. Pedestrian Mobility
Figure 7 shows the 635 trajectories extracted from a video
frame by frame overlaid on top of each other collected over
12 minutes time frame [17]. Temporal and spatial correlation
in locations under mobility is captured by modeling the envi-
ronment for each frame consecutively by embedding humans
in every frame into the ray tracing model as shown in Figure
8 [1]. This step is very crucial to capture the beam switching
patterns under realistic mobility conditions not at predefined
user speeds. Note that our algorithm does not rely on any
information extracted from cameras. It would only utilize
serving beam index information which is already collected at
gNB based on measurement reports. We use this simulation
methodology just to extract beam index sequences collected
on trajectories to test the prediction accuracy of our algorithm.
There are two TRPs serving the intersection in Fig. 7. The
tower in front of TRP 2 blocks the signal for almost 30
percent of users, which causes the users to switch to TRP
1 as the received signal power decreases. It is main source
of the attenuation, which may go up 40 dB as the user is
being blocked. Each TRP has a beamset each with 96 beams
spanning 360 degrees. The beams are of 10 to 60 degrees
beamwidths with fixed tilt and azimuth. Only 99 of those
beams serve the users in this area. For training, validating
and testing we use trajectories of different users. We test the
neural network on trajectories of 223 minutes of aggregated
length.
1) Top K Prediction Accuracy and Reliability: The output
of the neural network is the probability of each available beam
being the next best beam. From this we infer the most likely
beams by ranking the probabilities. We quantify the prediction
accuracy as follows:
• Best Beam Accuracy (Top-1): Proportion of time slots in
which the predicted beam with highest probability for a
slot is the best beam to serve the user in that slot.
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Fig. 9. Top K Prediction Accuracy: Proportion of time slots in which one out
of the top K likely predicted beams for a slot includes the best beam/TRP to
serve the user in that slot. With Top-2 prediction, we can achieve 96% beam
prediction accuracy and 99.5% TRP prediction accuracy.
• Top K Beam Accuracy: Proportion of time slots in which
one out of the top K likely predicted beams for a slot
includes the best beam to serve the user in that slot.
• Best TRP Accuracy: Proportion of time slots in which
predicted TRP is the best TRP to serve the user
Based on a history of length 1.2s the beams to serve the user
in the next 120 ms sampled at 12 ms intervals are predicted.
Prediction for longer intervals is feasible. We chose 120 ms
since it was a reasonably long time interval to show benefits
of predictions in radio access layer. Figure 9 shows the beam
and TRP prediction accuracy for different values of K. With
Top-2 prediction, 96% beam prediction accuracy and 99.5%
TRP prediction accuracy is achieved.
After extracting the probabilities of each predicted beam
from the output layer of the network, the relationship between
the probability value of a predicted beam and its reliability
is assessed, i.e. whether a higher beam prediction probability
implies that the prediction more likely to be accurate. To
answer this question, the reliability of beams is determined as
follows. For Top-K reliability, all samples whose best beam
prediction
 p probabilities
 p when quantized using the formula
0.025 0.025 + 0.5 results in the same value are determined.
The bin sizes are chosen as small as possible while ensuring
enough samples in each bin. Then for those predictions the
other K-1 most likely beams are determined as well. Reliability
is defined as percentage of all the samples where one of the
Top-K beams is a correct prediction.
In the set of 120 ms path segments where both TRP
switching and beam switchings within the same TRP occur, the
reliability is between 65-75% for 80% of samples for the best
beam prediction. With Top-2 prediction the reliability could
be pushed above 90% as shown in Fig. 10. 80% of samples
in this set had a best beam prediction probability above 0.8
with a reliability metric above 0.8. With Top-2 prediction even
the best beam prediction probability is as low as 0.5 we can
achieve above 90% reliability by relying on two beams. The
reliability could be further increased by increasing K.
2) Blockage Prevention: If gNB can predict when the
blockages or significant drop in the received power are likely
to happen it can react to it before the signal deteriorates.
A blockage instant is defined as the slot where the received
signal is below noise level or the signal deteriorates at least
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Fig. 10. Top-2 Reliability: Percentage of all the samples where one of the
Top-2 beams is a correct prediction versus best beam prediction probability
Fig. 11. Comparison of percentage of blocking instances. A blockage instant
is defined as the slot where the received signal is below noise level or the
signal deteriorates at least by 20 dB in comparison to the prior slot.
by 20 dB in comparison to the prior slot. Due to directive
antennas used at the transmitter a drop of 20 dB in signal
power does not always cause an outage but would impact the
quality of service. We determine the percentage of blockage
instances along the entire trajectories of users in the test data
set. Figure 11 compares the percentage of blockage instances
between measurement reporting every 36 ms, every 120 ms
and using our algorithm as shown in Fig. 3. We were able
to reduce the blocking instances by 55% even in comparison
to frequent measurement reporting every 36 ms. Reacting to
blockages proactively can bring significant gains in terms of
SNR. We improved 20th SNR percentile from -5 dB to 32 dB
at locations where a TRP switching occur by predictions in
comparison to measurement reports every 120 ms.
3) Measurement Report Reduction: Frequent measurement
reporting makes signal quality stable through appropriate beam
switching, avoiding sudden signal strength changes because
of using the wrong beam. The advantage of beam predictions
is to achieve the same performance by virtually increasing
measurement reporting periodicity through the predictions as
long as they are determined to be reliable. Moreover, we
can react to blockages before they happen or initiate beam
switchings with agility. Since we rely on imperfect histories to
predict it may be necessary to switch to conventional frequent
measurement reporting approach to build a reliable history.
Using the algorithm in Figure 3 with a minimum required SNR
threshold of 20 dB we were able to reduce measurement re-
porting overhead by 80%. If we rely on frequent measurement
reporting instead of predictions, we may improve SNR but
not necessarily throughput because of the associated overhead.
The overhead associated with frequent measurement reporting
and associated allocation of large number of CSI-RS resources
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reduce the benefit achieved in terms of per user throughput
because of sacrificing data resources to control channels.
B. Vehicular Mobility
Fig. 12. Lankershim Boulevard in Los Angeles, LA. It has four lane
bidirectional arterial segments and three signalized intersections. The traffic
data was collected using video cameras mounted on the roof of a 36-story
building.
Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology
published vehicular videos collected around the Lankershim
Boulevard for investigating driver behavior at microscopic
level [18]. In each video frame, we model all the vehicles
present in that frame with their proper orientation, and map
that within the ray tracing model for the fixed surroundings.
The extracted trajectories over 10 minutes are depicted in
Figure 13. There are four TRPs at locations marked with
squares in Figure 13 at 500-m inter-site distance. 180 beams
across these four sites serve the users. For each vehicle the
next beams to serve the user in the next 120 ms based on
a history of 1.2s is predicted. Figure 14 shows Top-K beam
and TRP prediction accuracy. We showed above 98% Top-2
prediction accuracy for both beam prediction and above 99%
Top-2 prediction accuracy for TRP prediction. If we predict 6s
ahead still using a history of 1.2 seconds, we achieve a TRP
prediction accuracy of 98% and beam prediction accuracy of
70%.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
We showed the feasibility of predicting the next best beam
to serve a specific user using the users history and a neural
network trained using the entire user ensemble in a given
environment. Especially at mm-waves and high mobility sce-
narios, periodic measurement reports may not be sufficient to
eliminate signal blockage. By predicting the next best beams
to serve the user we can enhance radio performance and
reduce the signaling overhead by as much as 80% in realistic
use cases. Since it is impossible to perfectly predict in all
scenarios, our scheme relies on predicting more than a single
best beam when necessary. Top K prediction, with K being
only 2 or 3, yields almost perfect beam and corresponding
TRP prediction accuracy and reliability. Prediction reliability
can be used to guide on-demand reporting. Incorporating the
Top K prediction into the beam management automatically
allocates measurement reports across the UEs when and where
it is essential.
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Authorized licensed use limited to: Carleton University. Downloaded on June 04,2021 at 22:57:35 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Fig. 13. Trajectories extracted from Lankershim Boulevard video, overlayed
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Fig. 14. Top-K prediction accuracy for predicting next 120ms base on a
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