Beam Training and Tracking in mmWave Communication:A Survey

Communicating on millimeter wave(mmWave)bands is ushering in a new epoch of mobile communication which provides the availability of 10 Gbps high data rate transmission.However,mmWave links are easily prone to short transmission range communication because of the serious free space path loss and the blockage by obstacles.To overcome these challenges,highly directional beams are exploited to achieve robust links by hybrid beamforming.Accurately aligning the transmitter and receiver beams,i.e.beam training,is vitally important to high data rate transmission.However,it may cause huge overhead which has negative effects on initial access,handover,and tracking.Besides,the mobility patterns of users are complicated and dynamic,which may cause tracking error and large tracking latency.An efficient beam tracking method has a positive effect on sustaining robust links.This article provides an overview of the beam training and tracking technologies on mmWave bands and reveals the insights for future research in the 6th Generation(6G)mobile network.Especially,some open research problems are proposed to realize fast,accurate,and robust beam training and tracking.We hope that this survey provides guidelines for the researchers in the area of mmWave communications.

Near-Field Beam Training for Holographic MIMO Communications: Typical Methods, Challenges and Future Directions

Holographic multiple-input multiple-output(HMIMO)has become an emerging technology for achieving ultra-high frequency spectral efficiency and spatial resolution in future wireless systems.The increasing antenna aperture leads to a more significant characterization of the spherical wavefront in near-field communications in HMIMO scenarios.Beam training as a key technique for wireless communication is worth exploring in this near-field scenario.Compared with the widely researched far-field beam training,the increased dimensionality of the search space for near-field beam training poses a challenge to the complexity and accuracy of the proposed algorithm.In this paper,we introduce several typical near-field beam training methods:exhaustive beam training,hierarchical beam training,and multi-beam training that includes equal interval multi-beam training and hash multi-beam training.The performances of these methods are compared through simulation analysis,and their effectiveness is verified on the hardware testbed as well.Additionally,we provide application scenarios,research challenges,and potential future research directions for near-field beam training.

Codebook Design and Beam Training for Extremely Large-Scale RIS:Far-Field or Near-Field?

Reconfigurable intelligent surface(RIS)is more likely to develop into extremely large-scale RIS(XL-RIS)to efficiently boost the system capacity for future 6 G communications.Beam training is an effective way to acquire channel state information(CSI)for XL-RIS.Existing beam training schemes rely on the far-field codebook.However,due to the large aperture of XL-RIS,the scatters are more likely to be in the near-field region of XL-RIS.The far-field codebook mismatches the near-field channel model.Thus,the existing far-field beam training scheme will cause severe performance loss in the XL-RIS assisted nearfield communications.To solve this problem,we propose the efficient near-field beam training schemes by designing the near-field codebook to match the nearfield channel model.Specifically,we firstly design the near-field codebook by considering the near-field cascaded array steering vector of XL-RIS.Then,the optimal codeword for XL-RIS is obtained by the exhausted training procedure.To reduce the beam training overhead,we further design a hierarchical nearfield codebook and propose the corresponding hierarchical near-field beam training scheme,where different levels of sub-codebooks are searched in turn with reduced codebook size.Simulation results show the proposed near-field beam training schemes outperform the existing far-field beam training scheme.

Towards Near-Field Communications for 6G:Challenges and Opportunities

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output(XL-MIMO)and terahertz(THz)communications are pivotal candidate technologies for supporting the development of 6G mobile networks.However,these techniques invalidate the common assumptions of far-field plane waves and introduce many new properties.To accurately understand the performance of these new techniques,spherical wave modeling of near-field communications needs to be applied for future research.Hence,the investigation of near-field communication holds significant importance for the advancement of 6G,which brings many new and open research challenges in contrast to conventional far-field communication.In this paper,we first formulate a general model of the near-field channel and discuss the influence of spatial nonstationary properties on the near-field channel modeling.Subsequently,we discuss the challenges encountered in the near field in terms of beam training,localization,and transmission scheme design,respectively.Finally,we point out some promising research directions for near-field communications.

Near-Far Field Beamforming for Holographic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output

Recently,holographic multiple-input multiple-output(HMIMO)has motivated its potential use to support high-capacity data transmission with spatially quasi-continuous apertures.As a practical instance of HMIMO,reconfigurable refractive surfaces(RRSs)equipped with numerous metamaterial elements are utilized as antennas by refracting incident signals from signal sources.In this paper,we investigate a multi-user communication system with an RRS deployed as the base station(BS)’s transmit antenna.To mitigate the high overhead of accurate channel state information(CSI)acquisition,the codebook design and beam training are employed to perform beamforming.Given the large scale of RRS,users are likely to be randomly distributed in both the near and far fields around the BS,which is unknown in advance.By considering radiation characteristics in both fields,a near-far field codebook is designed to be applicable to all users,regardless of their locations.To reduce overhead,a multi-user beam training is proposed to serve all users simultaneously by enhancing each codeword capable of covering multiple areas.Considering a general case that includes users in both fields,simulation results indicate that,without prior knowledge of user distribution,the proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art ones in terms of sum rate and overhead.