Robust Beam Tracking with Extended Kalman Filtering for Mobile Millimeter Wave Communications

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) combined with beam-forming technology is an attractive option for meeting the explosive growth of wireless data traffic. However, in a mobile communication scenario, slight misalignment between the transmit and receive beams may lead to a significant degradation of the received signal quality. This paper proposes a joint optimization of the mean square error (MSE) and extended Kalman filter (EKF) robust beam tracking algorithm to maintain the communication link. First, the initial channel state information is obtained via the two-dimensional MUSIC method. Then, the channel complex gain and beam angle are predicted with EKF algorithm from the received signal. Finally, we adopt the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion to perform iteratively optimization procedure to eliminate the estimation errors caused by the linear approximation of EKF. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the angle tracking error rates and improve the link maintenance time compared with existing angle tracking algorithms.