Beam Acquisition and Training in Millimeter Wave Networks with Narrowband Pilots

This paper studies initial beam acquisition in a millimeter wave network consisting of multiple access points (APs) and mobile devices. A training protocol for joint estimation of transmit and receive beams is presented with a general frame structure consisting of an initial access sub-frame followed by data transmission sub-frames. During the initial subframe, APs and mobiles sweep through a set of beams and determine the best transmit and receive beams via a handshake. All pilot signals are narrowband (tones), and the mobiles are distinguished by their assigned pilot frequencies. Both non-coherent and coherent beam estimation methods based on, respectively, power detection and maximum likelihood (ML) are presented. To avoid exchanging information about beamforming vectors between APs and mobiles, a local maximum likelihood (LML) algorithm is also presented. An efficient fast Fourier transform implementation is proposed for ML and LML to achieve high-resolution. A system-level optimization is performed in which the frame length, training time, and training bandwidth are selected to maximize a rate objective taking into account blockage and mobility. Simulation results based on a realistic network topology are presented to compare the performance of different estimation methods and training codebooks, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.