High-Resolution Fast Beam Discovery

Large-scale antenna arrays are a promising solution to cope with the severe attenuation associated with millimeter-wave bands. Pencil beams require significant signaling overhead for alignment, especially if explicit information about beam directions is not available. We present a beam direction discovery approach that utilizes beam pattern amplitudes and combines them with the phase information available for a quick estimate of the beam direction. Numerical results reveal a significant reduction of the pilot overhead by 42% and up to 62% compared to the state-of-the-art. © 2012 IEEE.