The Impact of Beamwidth on Temporal Channel Variation in Vehicular Channels and its Implications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) has great potential in realizing high data rate thanks to the large spectral channels. It is considered as a key technology for the fifth generation wireless networks and is already used in wireless LAN (e.g., IEEE 802.11ad). Using mmWave for vehicular communications, however, is often viewed with some skepticism due to a misconception that the Doppler spread would become too large at these high frequencies. This is not true when directional beam is employed for communications. In this paper, closed form expressions relating the channel coherence time and beamwidth are derived. Unlike prior work that assumed perfect beam pointing, the pointing error due to the receiver motion is incorporated to show that there exists a non-zero optimal beamwidth that maximizes the coherence time. To investigate the mobility effect on the beam alignment which is an important feature in mmWave systems, a novel concept of beam coherence time is defined. The beam coherence time, which is an effective measure of beam alignment frequency, is shown to be much larger than the conventional channel coherence time and thus results in reduced beam alignment overhead. Using the derived correlation function, the channel coherence time, and the beam coherence time, an overall performance metric considering both the channel time-variation and the beam alignment overhead is derived. Using this metric, it is shown that beam alignment in every beam coherence time performs better than the beam alignment in every channel coherence time due to the large overhead for the latter case.