A Primer on Contextual Beamforming Techniques that Exploit a User's
Location Information
Abstract
Wireless telecommunication is the backbone of mainstream technologies
such as automation, smart vehicles, virtual reality, and unmanned aerial
vehicles. Today, we are witnessing a wide-scale adoption of these
technologies in our daily lives. The endless opportunities generated due
to rapid deployments of new technologies have also brought about new
challenges, chief among them is ensuring reliable system performance of
cellular networks in mobility scenarios. Beamforming is an integral part
of modern mobile networks that enable spatial selectivity and hence
improved network quality. However, most of the beamforming techniques
are iterative; therefore, they introduce additional unwanted latency
into the system. Lately, we are witnessing an ever-increasing interest
in exploiting the location of a mobile user to speed up beamforming.
This paper comprehensively discusses how location-assisted beamforming
strategies improve performance, such as latency and signal-to-noise
ratio. Furthermore, we also show how artificial intelligence schemes
such as machine learning and deep learning are also used to implement
contextual beamforming techniques that exploit the user’s location
information.