Sensor-Assisted Codebook-Based Beamforming for Mobility Management in 60 GHz WLANs

The potential to provide multi-gbps throughput has made 60 GHz communication an attractive choice for next-generation WLANs. Due to highly directional nature of the communication, a 60 GHz link faces frequent outages in the presence of mobility. In this work, we present a sensor-assisted multi-level codebook-based beam width adaptation and beam switching to address the mobility challenges in 60 GHz WLANs. First, we show that by combining antenna element selection with codebook design, it is possible to generate a multilevel codebook that can cover different beam forming directions with many possible beam widths and directive gain. Second, we propose that accelerometer and magnetometer sensors which are commonly available on mobile devices can be used to better account for mobility, and perform near-real time beam width adaptation and beam switching. We evaluate the sensor-assisted multi-level codebook-based beam forming with trace-driven simulations using real mobility traces. Numeric evaluation shows that such beam forming can maintain the connectivity over 84% of the time even in presence of high device mobility.