Sensor-Aided Beamwidth and Power Control for Next Generation Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Ultra-reliable low-latency Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications are needed to meet the extreme requirements of enhanced driving applications. Millimeter-Wave (24.25-52.6 GHz) or sub-THz (>100 GHz) V2X communications are a viable solution, provided that the highly collimated beams are kept aligned during vehicles' maneuverings. In this work, we propose a sensor-assisted dynamic Beamwidth and Power Control (BPC) system to counteract the detrimental effect of vehicle dynamics, exploiting data collected by on-board inertial and positioning sensors, mutually exchanged among vehicles over a parallel low-rate link, e.g., 5G New Radio (NR) Frequency Range 1 (FR1). The proposed BPC solution works on top of a sensor-aided Beam Alignment and Tracking (BAT) system, overcoming the limitations of fixed-beamwidth systems and optimizing the performance in challenging Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) scenarios, even if extensions to Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) use-cases are feasible. We evaluate the sensor-assisted dynamic BPC by simulation over real trajectories and sensors' data collected by a dedicated experimental campaign. The goal is to show the advantages of the proposed BPC strategy in a high data-rate Line-Of-Sight (LOS) V2V context, and to outline the requirements in terms of sensors' sampling time and accuracy, along with the end-to-end latency on the control channel.INDEX TERMS Beam pointing, beam tracking, beamwidth and power control, on-board sensors, V2X

Sensor-Assisted Cooperative Localization and Communication in Multi-agent Networks

“…Being able to proactively known the position of the communication counterpart allows a vehicle to determine the candidate pointing direction without iteratively searching for the best candidate beam, thus saving time and improving the communication efficiency. Moreover, if position information comes with the associated accuracy, a vehicle can also implement a beamwidth and power adaptation algorithm, where not only the pointing direction is dynamically computed, but also the size of the beam and the required transmission power are optimally adjusted [10]. The exchange of vehicle navigation information is used as enabler to fasten the alignment of narrow beams such that the higher data rates of high frequency (mmWave and FSO) links are fully exploited.…”

“…Most of the research work is focused on the V2V link degradation due to beam misalignment as a consequence of vehicle mobility [5][6][7][8]10], but a study on V2I channel modeling has also been carried out to evaluated potential benefits of exploiting mmWave sparsity to design a robust beam alignment [9].…”

“…The second major research topic of my Ph.D. studies covers the area of communication in next-generation vehicular networks, and most of the contents have been published in [5][6][7][8][9][10]. The need of letting vehicle share massive amount of data comes from the evolution towards connected and automated mobility systems, where a set of services are going to be available for users, improving road safety and transportation efficiency [20,21].…”

“…It has then been extended to account for full 3D mobility over a winding trajectory [7,8]. Analyses not included in the thesis but carried out in the last period of my Ph.D., instead, considered a set of collected mobility data [10]. In all cases, despite considering different environments, simulation conditions, technologies and assumptions, it has been shown that the proposed sensorassisted beam-based (mmWave or FSO) solution for V2V communications brings remarkable improvements in terms of higher throughput, less outage and reduced signaling, providing an alternative to the onerous exhaustive beam search which does not use any information from sensors [1, Ch.…”

“…This chapter summarizes the main research works characterizing my Ph.D. studies at Politecnico di Milano from Nov. 2017 until Oct. 2020, under the supervision of Professor Monica Nicoli, which lead to the doctoral dissertation in [1] and the scientific publications in [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”