Channel Charting Assisted Beam Tracking

We propose a novel beam-tracking algorithm based on channel charting (CC) which maintains the communication link between a base station (BS) and a mobile user equipment (UE) in a millimeter wave (mmWave) mobile communications system. Our method first uses large-scale channel state information at the BS in order to learn a CC. The points in the channel chart are then annotated with the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of best beams. One can then leverage this CC-to-SNR mapping in order to track strong beams between UEs and BS efficiently and robustly at very low beam-search overhead. Simulation results in a mmWave scenario show that the performance of the CC-assisted beam tracking method approaches that of an exhaustive beam-search approach while requiring significantly lower beam-search overhead than conventional tracking methods.