Compressive Beam Alignment for Indoor Millimeter-Wave Systems

Traditional compressed sensing (CS) based beam alignment techniques enable swift mm-wave connectivity with a limited number of measurements. These techniques, however, rely on prior knowledge of the communication channel model and the user's array manifold to design the sensing matrix and minimize angle quantization errors. This limits their effectiveness in dynamic environments. Unlike prior work that rely on knowledge of the user's antenna architecture, beamforming codebook, and channel, this paper introduces a CS-based beam alignment technique that is agnostic to these factors. The proposed formulation eliminates angle quantization errors by mapping the recovered angular directions directly onto the user's specific beamforming codebook. Experimental results at 60 GHz demonstrate successful recovery of the mm-wave power distribution in the angular domain. This facilitates accurate beam alignment with limited measurements when compared to exhaustive search solutions.