Intelligent Autonomous User Discovery and Link Maintenance for mmWave and TeraHertz Devices with Directional Antennas

• Published in: IEEE transactions on cognitive communications and networking 2021-12, Vol.7 (4), p.1-1
• Main Authors: Khan, Zaheer, Lehtomaki, Janne J., Selis, Valerio, Ahmadi, Hamed, Marshall, Alan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ad hoc networks; Adaptive algorithms; directional antenna; Directional antennas; Directive antennas; IMU sensor; Inertial platforms; Inertial sensing devices; Millimeter waves; mmWave; orientation; Performance evaluation; predictions; Rotation; Solid modeling; teraHertz; Three-dimensional displays; Two dimensional displays; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 2332-7731; 2332-7731
• DOI: 10.1109/TCCN.2021.3071142

Use of smart directional antennas in handheld devices to generate a narrow beam in different directions for mmWave/TeraHertz communications present significant challenges. Devices using such antennas may have to scan several different directions in three-dimensional (3D) space to discover another user or an access point, a process that can result in problematic delays. Moreover, small movements of a user/device in the form of rotation and/or displacement may cause the discovered link to be lost. This paper proposes adaptive link discovery algorithms for devices in both infrastructure/ad hoc networks and evaluates their performance in terms of time-to-discovery. We show that one of the two proposed methods provides guaranteed discovery. We use an inertial measurement unit sensor to help intelligently rediscover a lost/degraded link. We propose sensor assisted link prediction methods for low-latency rediscovery in 3D space. We evaluate the effectiveness of our prediction-based rediscovery methods by testing them with real datasets representing various user/device 3D rotation patterns. We show that the smoothing based rediscovery can reach the prediction accuracy to 100% when two antenna sectors are searched, and it reduces the time-to-rediscovery by up to Sx (S times) as compared to the time-to-discovery, where S is the number of antenna sectors.