MMobile: Building a mmWave Testbed to Evaluate and Address Mobility Effects

Abstract

Beamforming methods need to be critically evaluated and improved to achieve the promised performance of millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G NR in high mobility applications like Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Conventional beam management methods developed for higher frequency applications do not directly carry over to the 28 GHz mmWave regime, where propagation and reflection characteristics are vastly different. Further, real system deployments and tests are required to verify these methods in a practical setting. In this work, we develop mMobile, a custom 5G NR compliant mmWave testbed to evaluate beam management algorithms. We describe the architecture and challenges in building such a testbed. We then create a novel, low-complexity beam tracking algorithm by exploiting the 5G NR waveform structure and evaluate its performance on the testbed. The algorithm can sustain almost twice the average throughput compared to the baseline. We also release our outdoor mobility dataset that can be used to improve mobility management further.