A Comparison of Beam Refinement Algorithms for Millimeter Wave Initial Access

Paper in proceedings, 2017

Initial access (IA) is identified as a key challenge for the upcoming 5G mobile communication system operating at high carrier frequencies, and several techniques are currently being proposed. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed genetic algorithm (GA)-based beam refinement scheme to include beamforming at both the transmitter and the receiver, and compare the performance with alternative approaches in the millimeter wave multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) networks. Taking the millimeter wave communications characteristics and various metrics into account, we investigate the effect of different parameters such as the number of transmit antennas/users/per-user receive antennas, beamforming resolution as well as hardware impairments on the system performance employing different beam refinement algorithms. As shown, our proposed GA-based approach performs well in delay-constrained networks with multi-antenna users. Compared to the considered state-of-the-art schemes, our method reaches the highest service outage-constrained end-to-end throughput with considerably less implementation complexity. Moreover, taking the users' mobility into account, GA-based approach can remarkably reduce the beam refinement delay at low/moderate speeds when the spatial correlation is taken into account.