Position-Aided Beam Management for Multi-Panel Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

Multiple antenna array panels overcome challenges related to hand and body blockage for millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems. Power consumption, though, increases with the size of the antenna arrays and the number of panels. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient multi-panel dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) structure that is not only useful for handsets but also for other applications such as vehicular communications. We propose a location-based ML-aided joint panel and beam management algorithm for the user equipments (UEs) equipped with a multi-panel DMA. This provides a method to select beams and panels with low overhead. The results in vehicular communication settings showed that the proposed beam selection solution for multi-panel DMA performs well and generalizes over different codebooks, antenna sizes, and even orientations and antenna types with the same polarization.