Mobile millimeter wave channel tracking: A bayesian beamforming framework against DOA uncertainty

Abstract

A Bayesian approach for joint beamforming and tracking is presented, which is robust to uncertain direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation in millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. The uncertain or completely unknown DOA is modeled as a discrete random variable with a priori distribution defined over a set of candidate DOAs, which describes the level of uncertainty. The estimation problem of DOA is formulated as a weighted sum of previously observed DOA values, where the weights are chosen according to a posteriori probability density function (pdf) of the DOA. In particular, we present a motion trajectory-based a priori probability approximation method, which implies a high probability to perform a directional estimate within a specific spatial region. We demonstrate that the proposed approach is robust to DOA uncertainty, and the beam tracking problem can be addressed by incorporating the Bayesian approach with an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Simulation results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.