Date of publication xxxx 00, 0000, date of current version xxxx 00, 0000.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.DOI

Ultra-Reliable Communication in B5G

mmWave Networks: risk mitigation by
Beam Alignment game
LOUBNA GAFARI1 , (Student Member, IEEE), ESSAID SABIR1,2 , (Senior Member, IEEE),
WISSAL ATTAOUI1 , (Member, IEEE), MOHAMED SADIK1
1
NEST Research Group, National Higher School of Electricity and Mechanics, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Morocco
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Quebec at Montreal, Montreal, H2L 2C4, Quebec, Canada

ABSTRACT Beam Alignment (BA) is to guarantee the alignment between the transmitter and receiver
beams in order to establish a reliable communication link in millimeter-wave (mmwave) systems. Searching
for the optimal transmit-receive beam pair,induces significant BA latency is on the order of seconds in the
worst case.

INDEX TERMS

I. INTRODUCTION (MBS) equipped with Nb antennas and one user’s equip-

URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications) is a ment (UEs) equipped with Nk antennas. we adopt a hybrid
type of communication service that requires extremely high beamforming architecture , which enjoys both analog and
reliability and low latency. It is typically used for applica- digital beamforming techniques [1], and assume that N b ≫
tions such as industrial automation, autonomous vehicles, N k ≥ 1. Data traffic is generated from the SC to the UE
and mission-critical communication services. One of the using mmWave communication. The uplink training phase is
challenges of URLLC is to provide a high level of relia- used to obtain the DL channel in a co-channel time-division
bility and low latency for all users, including those in the duplexing protocol.
tail distribution of the latency and reliability performance.
This requires designing communication protocols that can
provide low latency and high reliability even in the presence
of extreme delays or packet losses. This can be particu-
larly challenging in wireless communication networks, where
channel conditions can vary rapidly and unpredictably. Thus
the ongoing research is focused on developing new solutions
to address this problem.
Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is a promising tech-
nology for URLLC due to its high data rates and low latency. FIGURE 1: The analog beamforming training procedure,
However, the use of mmWave technology also presents sig- with the simplified antenna radiation pattern
nificant challenges due susceptiblity to blockage from build-
ings and other structures thereby intelligent beamforming
and beam tracking techniques should be considered neces- Let consider:
sities to overcome the immense propagation loss in evolved tx rx
• gbk and gbk denote the analog transmitter and receiver
wireless systems to the presence of tail distribution in the
beamforming gains at the SC b and UE k respectively.
latency and reliability performance. Related Work: tx rx
• ωbk and ωbk denote the angles deviating from the
strongest path between the SC b and UE k
II. SYSTEM MODEL tx rx
• θbk and θbk represent e the beamwidth at the SC and
A. MMWAVE MODEL
UE, respectively
Consider the downlink (DL) transmission of a single cell
massive MIMO system consisting of one macro base station In this paper, we adopt the following widely used antenna

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radiation pattern model [1] : determined by Nb and Nk antennas where T denotes the
( tx
2π−(2π−θbk )η tx
θbk
) set of players (Transmitters) of a noncooperative game G
tx
tx tx tx tx
θbk
, if ωbk ≤ 2 which tries to predict players’ individual strategies and
gbk (ωbk , θbk ) = (1)
η otherwise payoffs. The set of strategies space of each player m ∈ T
( rx rx
) , and W corresponds to the set of beamforming directions
2π−(2π−θbk )η rx θbk
rx rx rx rx
θbk , if ωbk ≤ 2 ωm ∈ W = [0, ωm , 2ωm , ...2π − ωm ]
gbk (ωbk , θbk ) = (2)
η otherwise Let consider the strategic-form game by using the compact
triplet notation G = (T , Wm,m∈T , Um,m∈T ) , where the
where 0 < η ≪ 1 is the side lobe gain. utility function Um is defined as:
To describe the time-varying behavior of a system, we use a " #
Markov chain to model the channel state as it changes over 1 X
time. Let h ∈ CNb ×Nk denote the channel state from the SC Um = Pa (t) ∗ log Eh exp(µm rm (t))
µm
to UE and there are T ∈ states, i.e., for each h(t), t = 1, .., T .
the imperfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed. as (4)
per [2], the estimated channel between the SC b and UE k can
be modeled
√ as :
1 p where Pa (t) is the instantaneous alignment probability. The
ĥ = Nb × Nk Θ 2 ( 1 − τk2 w + τ ŵ)
parameter µm is used to control the desired level of risk-
Where:
N ×Nk
sensitivity in a utility function, which will penalize the vari-
• Θ ∈ C b is the antenna spatial correlation matrix ability (µm → 0 for risk-neutral objective, and µm < 0
that accounts for path loss and shadow fading. for risk-averse objective) [4]. the operator E denotes the
N ×Nk
• w ∈ C b is the small-scale fading channel matrix, expectation operation. A straightforward Taylor expansion of
modeled as a random matrix with zero mean and vari- the exp and log in the utility function given in Eq 4, yields:
1
ance of Nb ×N k
" # " # !
• τ ∈ [0, 1] reflects the estimation accuracy for UE ; in X µm X
Um = Pa (t)∗ Eh rm (t)) + VARh rm (t)) +O(µm )
case of perfect CSI, τ = 0 2
N ×Nk
• ŵ ∈ C b is the estimated noise vector, also mod-
eled as a random matrix with zero mean and variance of (5)
1
Nb ×Nk
By applying a linear precoding scheme f (ĥ) [1] , i.e,f (ĥ) = In its basic form, the utility function Eq.(4) takes into account
ĥ the achievable rate of UE from SC can be calculated as: both the mean and variance terms (Var) of the mmWave links.
tx rx
! For each SC and UE , we formulate the following distributed
pb gbk gbk |hf |2 optimization problem as:
r(t) = W log2 1 + P tx rx 2
(3)
b′ ̸=b pb gb′ k gb′ k |hf | + ηbk
′ " #
1 X
Where pb and pb′ are the transmit powers of SC b and max Pa (t) ∗ log Eh exp(µm rm (t))
µm (6)
SC b’ respectively. W depicts the system bandwidth of the
mmWave frequency band. And ηbk represents The thermal subject to rm (t) ∈ R, pb ≤ Pbmax
noise of UE k served by SC b.
III. CONCLUSION
B. BEAM ALIGNMENT GAME ACKNOWLEDGMENT
REFERENCES
In mmWave systems, directional beamforming is essential to
[1] J. Liu and E. S. Bentley, “Hybrid-beamforming-based millimeter-wave
overcome the large scale fading (high path loss and shad- cellular network optimization,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Com-
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Hong, “Ultra-reliable and low latency communication in mmwave-enabled
receiver, which can be challenging in dynamic environments massive mimo networks,” IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 21, no. 9, pp.
with mobility and blockages [3]. 2041–2044, 2017.
Incorporating the beam alignment game into URLLC in [3] W. Attaoui, K. Bouraqia, and E. Sabir, “Initial access & beam alignment for
mmwave and terahertz communications,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 35 363–
mmWave systems yields many benefits, including: 35 397, 2022.
• Improved reliability and latency:by achieving faster and [4] O. Mihatsch and R. Neuneier, “Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning,”
Machine learning, vol. 49, pp. 267–290, 2002.
more accurate beam alignment
• Better adaptation to changing environments:the game
can help the system to adapt to changing environments
with mobility and blockages by continuously optimizing
the beam alignment.
To model the communication between the SC and the UE , we
propose a game theory that gathers all possible probabilities,
2 VOLUME 4, 2016