GPS-Aided Deep Learning for Beam Prediction and Tracking in UAV mmWave Communication

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication enables high data rates for cellular-connected Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, a robust beam management remains challenging due to significant path loss and the dynamic mobility of UAVs, which can destabilize the UAV-base station (BS) link. This resea...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vendi Ardianto Nugroho, Byung Moo Lee
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2025-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11072409/
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Summary:Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication enables high data rates for cellular-connected Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, a robust beam management remains challenging due to significant path loss and the dynamic mobility of UAVs, which can destabilize the UAV-base station (BS) link. This research presents a GPS-aided deep learning (DL) model that simultaneously predicts current and future optimal beams for UAV mmWave communications, maintaining a Top-1 prediction accuracy exceeding 70% and an average power loss below 0.6 dB across all prediction steps. These outcomes stem from a proposed data splitting method ensuring balanced label distribution, paired with a GPS preprocessing technique that extracts key positional features, and a DL architecture that maps sequential position data to beam index predictions. The model reduces overhead by approximately 93% compared to exhaustive search methods with 95% beam prediction accuracy guarantees, and ensures 94% to 96% of predictions exhibit mean power loss not exceeding 1 dB.
ISSN:2169-3536