Location- and Orientation-aware Millimeter Wave Beam Selection for Multi-Panel Antenna Devices

While initial beam alignment (BA) in millimeter-wave networks has been thoroughly investigated, most research assumes a simplified terminal model based on uniform linear/planar arrays with isotropic antennas. Devices with non-isotropic antenna elements need multiple panels to provide good spherical coverage, and exhaustive search over all beams of all the panels leads to unacceptable overhead. This paper proposes a location- and orientation-aware solution that manages the initial BA for multi-panel devices. We present three different neural network structures that provide efficient BA with a wide range of training dataset sizes, complexity, and feedback message sizes. Our proposed methods outperform the generalized inverse fingerprinting and hierarchical panel-beam selection methods for two considered edge and edge-face antenna placement designs.