Title:  mmWave Beamforming Facilitated by Hierarchical Codebooks and Structural Bandit Algorithms

Committee: 

Dr. Bloch, Advisor

Dr. Sundaresan, Chair

Dr. Romberg

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to investigate approaches to Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) beamforming practices that improve upon existing methods, in particular for wireless communication standards. The current methods rely on an inefficient linear search over all possible steering directions for initial alignment, and require highly manual configurations to maintain alignment over time. We leverage state-of-the-art algorithms from areas such as reinforcement learning to improve upon these existing practices. Preliminary work shows that our algorithms are competitive with situations in which full Channel-State Information (CSI) is exploited for Bayesian decision making on the steered beam directions. First, we show the improvement from our algorithms for the initial beam alignment problem through the exploitation of structure induced by a hierarchical beamforming codebook. Second, we present a low-overhead approach to tracking a mobile communicating entity over time while maintaining beam alignment. The alignment and tracking sensing problems must co-exist with the ultimate goal of communicating between multiple entities. We propose research that extends these approaches to architectures for Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) in which both functions are jointly designed.