Abstract
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is considered as the most promising solution for future 5G cellular networks. However, it suffers from a severe propagation loss causing dramatic link quality degradation and limiting its coverage area. Antenna beamforming appears to be a suitable solution to overcome this problem and provides longer transmission outdoor mmWave links. Accordingly, highly complicated conventional beamforming training (BT) techniques based on exhaustively searching all beam settings in all possible directions are used for mmWave discovery and association. This results in a long-time delay and a high-power consumption mmWave small cell discovery and association due to the large BT overhead. In this paper, a paradigm of mmWave small cell BT, discovery and association based on WiFi localization is proposed especially for local outdoor urban environments, e.g., campus area. Due to the use of beamforming, mmWave becomes a location-driven wireless communication system, hence positioning can extremely relax the complexity of mmWave link establishment. Simulation results show the high potency of the proposed scheme in reducing the complexity of mmWave BT, discovery and association compared to the conventional scheme of exhaustively searching all beam directions.