LiDAR Aided Future Beam Prediction in Real-World Millimeter Wave V2I Communications

This paper presents the first large-scale real-world evaluation for using LiDAR data to guide the mmWave beam prediction task. A machine learning (ML) model that leverages the LiDAR sensory data to predict the current and future beams was developed. Based on the large-scale real-world dataset, DeepSense 6G, this model was evaluated in a vehicle-to-infrastructure communication scenario with highly-mobile vehicles. The experimental results show that the developed LiDAR-aided beam prediction and tracking model can predict the optimal beam in 95% of the cases and with more than 90% reduction in the beam training overhead. The LiDAR-aided beam tracking achieves comparable accuracy performance to a baseline solution that has perfect knowledge of the previous optimal beams, without requiring any knowledge about the previous optimal beam information and without any need for beam calibration. This highlights a promising solution for the critical beam alignment challenges in mmWave and terahertz communication systems.