Resource-Efficient Beam Prediction in mmWave Communications with Multimodal Realistic Simulation Framework

Beamforming is a key technology in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications that improves signal transmission by optimizing directionality and intensity. However, conventional channel estimation methods, such as pilot signals or beam sweeping, often fail to adapt to rapidly changing communication environments. To address this limitation, multimodal sensing-aided beam prediction has gained significant attention, using various sensing data from devices such as LiDAR, radar, GPS, and RGB images to predict user locations or network conditions. Despite its promising potential, the adoption of multimodal sensing-aided beam prediction is hindered by high computational complexity, high costs, and limited datasets. Thus, in this paper, a novel resource-efficient learning framework is introduced for beam prediction, which leverages a custom-designed cross-modal relational knowledge distillation (CRKD) algorithm specifically tailored for beam prediction tasks, to transfer knowledge from a multimodal network to a radar-only student model, achieving high accuracy with reduced computational cost. To enable multimodal learning with realistic data, a novel multimodal simulation framework is developed while integrating sensor data generated from the autonomous driving simulator CARLA with MATLAB-based mmWave channel modeling, and reflecting real-world conditions. The proposed CRKD achieves its objective by distilling relational information across different feature spaces, which enhances beam prediction performance without relying on expensive sensor data. Simulation results demonstrate that CRKD efficiently distills multimodal knowledge, allowing a radar-only model to achieve 94.62% of the teacher performance. In particular, this is achieved with just 10% of the teacher network's parameters, thereby significantly reducing computational complexity and dependence on multimodal sensor data.