Characterizing Real-time Radar-assisted Beamforming in mmWave V2V Links

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is poised to significantly enhance vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) networks by facilitating real-time data transmission between vehicles at gigabits-per-second (Gbps) data rates. However, the high relative mobility between vehicles results in substantial beamforming overhead, negatively affecting V2V network throughput and latency. In this paper, we introduce a novel real-time radar-assisted beamforming approach for V2V networks and assess its performance in four typical scenarios using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. In the transmitter static scenario, our proposed scheme surpasses the default 802.11ad protocol by up to 54% in throughput. In the highly dynamic scenario, our approach yields a 67% improvement in throughput and exhibits 90% lower latency than the default 802.11ad protocol. Furthermore, we investigate a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, demonstrating that our proposed scheme can achieve higher data throughput rates by opting for the most robust beam sector rather than frequently alternating between weak beam patterns. Finally, the preliminary result in the highway scenario shows that our protocol can improve the throughput by 66% more than the default protocol.