REM-Based Beam Management with GNSS Location Error Mitigation in Urban Millimeter-Wave Networks

IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), pp. 1–6

Abstract

5G-NR in FR2 relies on beamforming and accurate beam alignment between the gNodeB (gNB) and the user equipment (UE) to address challenging channel conditions. Maintaining beam alignment for a mobile UE requires frequent updates via beam-sweeping and directional radio frequency measurements, entailing high delay and signaling overhead. Location-aided beam management has emerged as a promising solution for reducing this overhead by combining UE location with historical directional beam training information to construct radio environment maps (REMs) for effective beam alignment. However, the highly site-specific nature of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) propagation makes REM-based beam management vulnerable to performance degradation due to errors in UE location information, e.g., obtained via global navigation satellite system (GNSS), affecting the accuracy of both REM construction and querying. This paper proposes a 5G-NR standard-compliant solution to mitigate GNSS location error in REM-based beam management, by constructing our rank-REM from multiple UE directional channel measurements and multi-beam monitoring for connected UEs. Our results, based on ray-tracing in an urban environment, show that our proposed REM construction and querying strategy effectively mitigates realistic GNSS location error, substantially enhancing link stability for a mobile UE by reducing radio link failures (RLFs) and handovers, thus enabling effective REM-based beam management for 5G-and-beyond.

Authors 3

1. Aron Schott Aachen Institute for Networked Systems (INETS)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems

2. Marina Petrova Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Mobile Communications and Computing

3. Ljiljana Simić Aachen Institute for Networked Systems (INETS)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University,Institute for Networked Systems