TY - JOUR
T1 - Beam Switching in mmWave 5G
T2 - Evaluation in a Realistic Industrial Scenario
AU - Tarrias, Antonio
AU - Damsgaard, Sebastian Bro
AU - Lechuga, Melisa Maria Lopez
AU - Sørensen, Troels Bundgaard
AU - E. Mogensen, Preben
AU - Fortez, Sergio
AU - Barco, Raquel
PY - 2024/11/25
Y1 - 2024/11/25
N2 - Fifth Generation (5G) Millimeter Wave spectrum (mmWave) cellular networks are particularly interesting within the Industry 4.0 paradigm. mmWaves provide flexibility to the industrial use case, as well as enable specific application requirements, e.g. robots needing high data rates and low latency communication. Coverage at mmWaves, however, is challenged by additional attenuation and blocking effects, requiring the use of beamforming to overcome this by steering transmissions towards specific directions. Reliability is a key requirement as well, and requires, e.g, seamless beam switching during movement. Here, the resulting directivity of the antennas makes the beam switching procedures key to maintain the connectivity as the users move by. The present work aims to analyze the beam switching performance in a real-world indoor industrial scenario with high clutter to identify potential failures and propose optimization strategies. Firstly, this work has gathered insights into how beamforming operates under specific situations, identifying unused beams, relating the beam switching to the User Equipment (UE)’s movement, and collecting statistics from the beam switchings. Finally, a refined beam switching criteria is proposed based on radio metrics and location information, which outperforms the current criteria used by the network. This is evaluated based on the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and the number of beam switchings under different criteria.
AB - Fifth Generation (5G) Millimeter Wave spectrum (mmWave) cellular networks are particularly interesting within the Industry 4.0 paradigm. mmWaves provide flexibility to the industrial use case, as well as enable specific application requirements, e.g. robots needing high data rates and low latency communication. Coverage at mmWaves, however, is challenged by additional attenuation and blocking effects, requiring the use of beamforming to overcome this by steering transmissions towards specific directions. Reliability is a key requirement as well, and requires, e.g, seamless beam switching during movement. Here, the resulting directivity of the antennas makes the beam switching procedures key to maintain the connectivity as the users move by. The present work aims to analyze the beam switching performance in a real-world indoor industrial scenario with high clutter to identify potential failures and propose optimization strategies. Firstly, this work has gathered insights into how beamforming operates under specific situations, identifying unused beams, relating the beam switching to the User Equipment (UE)’s movement, and collecting statistics from the beam switchings. Finally, a refined beam switching criteria is proposed based on radio metrics and location information, which outperforms the current criteria used by the network. This is evaluated based on the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and the number of beam switchings under different criteria.
KW - 5G
KW - Beam switching
KW - Beamforming
KW - Industrial
KW - Location
KW - Optimisation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85210970481&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3506052
DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3506052
M3 - Journal article
SN - 2169-3536
VL - 12
SP - 182571
EP - 182579
JO - IEEE Access
JF - IEEE Access
M1 - 10767248
ER -