Beam management for millimeter-wave mobile communications based on digital twin-enabled scenario cognition

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) links are highly susceptible to rapid channel variations and are vulnerable to obstacles. As large-scale antenna arrays can cause high training overhead and frequent beam adjustment inevitably, the use of narrow beams tends to significantly increase system overhead and latency of millimeter-wave beam management. To address the above problems, we propose a novel beam management method for millimeter-wave mobile communications based on digital twin-enabled scenario cognition. Digital twin technology can enhance beam management by accounting for scenario characteristics, including environment information and dynamic channel information. This enables the mapping and synchronization between the physical world and digital world. Simulation results demonstrate that, thanks to scenario cognition, the resulting beam tracking scheme contributes to efficient adjustment, and the system overhead can be reduced. The appropriate system configuration can be obtained iteratively by a tradeoff between the system performance and system complexity (in terms of the product of overhead and delay).