AoD and AoA tracking with directional sounding beam design for millimeter wave MIMO systems

Millimeter wave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems equipped with large-sized array antennas have a great potential to boost the achievable data rates by leveraging large bandwidth available at the spectrum. In this paper, we focus on the angle of departure (AoD) and angle of arrival (AoA) tracking problem for temporally correlated sparse millimeter wave MIMO channels. With the beam space MIMO channel modeling, a low complexity two-sided channel sounding scheme for the AoD and AoA tracking is investigated. The adoption of the sparse beam space MIMO channel representation eventually converts the AoD and AoA estimation problem to the support recovery problem. For the support recovery, we employ an iterative soft thresholding algorithm which is broadly referred to as the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm. The support recovery performance of the AMP, however, suffers from serious deterioration especially at the low SNR regime. To remedy, several directional sounding beam design schemes are proposed to ameliorate the performance of the channel tracking at the low SNR. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AoD and AoA tracking outperforms other benchmark schemes when compared in a low SNR setting.