A Two-Stage Beam Alignment Framework for Hybrid MmWave Distributed Antenna Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the beam alignment problem in millimeter-wave (mmWave) distributed antenna systems where a home base station communicates with multiple users through a number of distributed remote radio units (RRUs). Specifically, a two-stage schedule-and-align (TSSA) scheme is proposed to facilitate efficient communications. In the first stage, a coarse beam scanning over the entire angular space is performed while beam indices and the corresponding peak-to-background ratios of the received power-angle-spectrum are obtained from users' feedback. Then, by exploiting the user feedback, an efficient user scheduling algorithm is developed to improve the system spectral efficiency and to reduce the system misalignment probability. Next, the second stage of beam search is performed by each RRU with reconfigured search angles, search steps, and power levels to obtain a refined beam alignment. Simulation results show that the proposed TSSA scheme can significantly outperform the conventional one-stage method in both centralized and distributed mmWave systems in terms of beam alignment accuracy and spectral efficiency.