Low Overhead refers to minimizing additional computational and communication resources, as well as reducing associated time and energy consumption, required for managing highly-directional beams in mmWave 5G networks. The goal is to optimize the efficiency of beam management processes, especially in scenarios involving a large number of users, where traditional methods might introduce significant performance challenges.

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SpaceBeam: LiDAR-Driven One-Shot mmWave Beam Management

mmWave 5G networks promise to enable a new generation of networked applications requiring a combination of high throughput and ultra-low latency. However, in practice, mmWave performance scales poorly for large numbers of users due to the significant overhead required to manage the highly-directional beams. We find that we can substantially reduce or eliminate this overhead by using out-of-band infrared measurements of the surrounding environment generated by a LiDAR sensor. To accomplish this, we develop a ray-tracing system that is robust to noise and other artifacts from the infrared sensor, create a method to estimate the reflection strength from sensor data, and finally apply this information to the multiuser beam selection process. We demonstrate that this approach reduces beam-selection overhead by over 95% in indoor multi-user scenarios, reducing network latency by over 80% and increasing throughput by over 2× in mobile scenarios.