A Link Quality Estimation-based Beamforming Training Protocol for IEEE 802.11ay MU-MIMO Communications

Published

January 15, 2021

Author(s)

Munsuk Kim, Tanguy Ropitault, SuKyoung Lee, Nada Golmie

Abstract

IEEE 802.11ay supports downlink multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (DL MU-MIMO) transmission from an access point (AP) to multiple stations (STAs). The MU-MIMO beamforming training (BFT) enables the AP and the STAs to find appropriate directional antenna patterns; to this end, the AP transmits multiple action frames to the STAs during the MU-MIMO BFT. However, if antenna weight vectors (AWVs) are determined inefficiently to transmit the action frames, unnecessary transmissions may occur leading to a larger BFT time. To mitigate signaling overhead, existing schemes in our previous work have employed AWVs using multiple beams simultaneously to transmit the action frames. Nevertheless, the existing schemes still suffer from redundant transmissions because these schemes overlook transmit diversity gain obtained from the multi-beam concurrent transmission. In this paper, we thus propose a novel transmit antenna configuration scheme that mitigates signaling overhead by considering the transmit diversity of the intersymbol interference (ISI) channel incurred when the multiple beams are used simultaneously. Our proposed scheme determines each candidate AWV using multiple beams and efficiently finds STAs that the corresponding multi-beam concurrent transmission can reach. The numerical and simulation results show that our proposed scheme shortens the BFT time by reducing the number of action frames transmitted in the MU-MIMO BFT, as compared to the existing schemes.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Communications

Volume

69

Issue

1

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2020.3030956

Local Download

Keywords

MU-MIMO, Beamforming training, IEEE 802.11ay, mmWave

Citation

Kim, M. , Ropitault, T. , Lee, S. and Golmie, N. (2021), A Link Quality Estimation-based Beamforming Training Protocol for IEEE 802.11ay MU-MIMO Communications, IEEE Transactions on Communications, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TCOMM.2020.3030956 (Accessed October 9, 2025)