Millimeter-Wave Communications
Latest papers
16 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.
For sensing-aided communications, single-endpoint sensing offers only a partial view of propagation, motivating link-centric sensing across both endpoints. We propose cross-image routing attention (CIRA) for sparse association and mutual enhancement of propagation-relevant features from dual-endpoint RGB images. Building on CIRA, CiFormer predicts millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam-pair power matrices for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Experiments show that CiFormer reduces mean absolute error and improves top-1 beam-pair selection accuracy by 3.15 percentage points over the strongest baseline. Visualizations and ablation studies support dual-endpoint sensing and selective cross-view interaction in capturing propagation-relevant dependencies, suggesting broader applications in wireless tasks beyond beam prediction.
Beamforming Design Via GNN in mmWave Cell-Free Massive MIMO Using Sub-6 GHz CSI
Beamforming methods in millimeter-wave (mmWave) cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CFmMIMO) systems require accurate channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition entails significant training overhead. This paper shows that fully digital cell-free mmWave beamforming can be effectively learned from sub-6 GHz CSI using a graph neural network (GNN). Specifically, we represent a CFmMIMO system as a wireless graph, and the GNN is trained to approximate beamformers that maximize the downlink sum-rate based on the available sub-6 GHz CSI. A message-passing mechanism is proposed to capture inter-user interference and inter-base-station cooperation across different network topologies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed sub-6 GHz-assisted GNN-based beamformer achieves competitive and often superior sum-rate performance compared to classical baselines that rely on full mmWave CSI.
Multi-Agent Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning for Smart Campus Coverage
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has recently gained a great attention due to its real-time adaptation and effectiveness in complex optimization problems. This paper investigates the optimal deployment of millimeter-wave (mmWave) base stations (BSs) in a realistic, non-convex campus topology. The optimization problem is NP-hard, due to the non-convex, non-smooth nature of the max-min fairness objective. To overcome these constraints, we formulate the BS placement as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and systematically benchmark four DRL schemes: a discrete single-agent Deep Q-Network (DQN), a spatially partitioned Multi-Agent DQN, a continuous single-agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), and a geographically partitioned multi-agent DDPG framework. Numerical evaluations reveal that the multi-agent DDPG approach substantially outperforms single-agent in dense scenarios. Additionally full coverage is achieved, and a fairness Jain's index of 0.94 is obtained. Finally, the multi-agent demonstrates highly efficient computational convergence of dense scenarios with users.
RIS-Aided mmWave Localization Under Cross-Link Interference via Beam-Domain ML Fingerprinting
Accurate user equipment (UE) localization is critical for beam management in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) based sixth-generation (6G) networks, especially if the direct base-station-UE links are unavailable. This paper proposes a beam-domain fingerprint framework that maps the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) across a small set of predefined RIS reflection states to the UE azimuth angle and range, without requiring channel state information (CSI). Crucially, we extend the framework to a realistic interference-impaired scenario in which a nearby cross-link interferer (CLI) corrupts the clean SNR fingerprint, yielding a signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) fingerprint; an interference-to-noise ratio (INR)-constrained calibration strategy keeps the interference level physically interpretable. Four machine-learning (ML) regressors are evaluated under both conditions. Simulation results at 28 GHz with a 20x20 RIS show that k-nearest neighbors (KNN) achieves the lowest angle MAE of 0.37 degrees and range MAE of 4 cm under clean conditions, rising to 1.4 degrees and 7.6 cm under interference. A key finding is that interference degrades angle estimation substantially more than range estimation across all models, a consequence of the asymmetric encoding of location information in the beam-domain fingerprint.
Meta-Transfer Learning for mmWave Beam Alignment
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) beam alignment is critical for next-generation wireless systems, but existing approaches either update all parameters during adaptation or restrict updates to a subset of layers without adapting intermediate feature representations. We propose MTL-BA, a meta-transfer learning framework for multiple-input single-output (MISO) beam alignment that freezes a pre-trained convolutional backbone and meta-learns lightweight Scale-and-Shift (SS) adapters and a classifier head. Under an outdoor-to-indoor shift in DeepMIMO, MTL-BA achieves the highest Top-1 accuracy among the evaluated methods at 35 dB while updating fewer parameters than full fine-tuning and meta-training faster than MAML.
RIS-Assisted Proactive Handover for Reliable mmWave Wireless Networks
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks are highly susceptible to line-of-sight (LoS) blockages. Vision-aided wireless communications (VAWC) enable proactive handovers (PHO) to mitigate such blockages; however, PHO becomes challenging when no nearby base station (BS) is available. In such cases, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can be used to restore connectivity. To ensure timely PHO, the RIS configuration time must be taken into account, as the large number of RIS elements can limit responsiveness in time-sensitive scenarios. This work proposes a novel RIS-assisted PHO approach that optimizes the number of allocated RIS elements to balance signal processing complexity and link quality under handover timing constraints, making the RIS-assisted link more energy-efficient. An optimization problem based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is formulated to determine the optimal end-to-end RIS link setup that runs offline to bypass latency constraints. Results show that reducing the number of RIS elements by 12% leads to a 10% decrease in dissipated energy without compromising the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Moreover, the RIS-assisted link achieves a 15--30 dB improvement in blocked regions while maintaining accurate PHO timing.
CRB-Guided Framework Design and Resource Allocation for Indoor mmWave ISCC Systems
Integrated sensing, communication, and computation (ISCC) provides a promising framework for indoor human-centric applications. In these applications, short-term human pose prediction facilitates continuous human tracking and resource allocation in advance. In this paper, we propose a Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) guided resource allocation framework for indoor mmWave ISCC systems to minimize the human pose prediction error under communication, latency, and energy constraints. We characterize the impact of sensing power on range-estimation uncertainty and point-cloud perturbation based on the CRB. To capture the impact of computation resources on prediction performance, we adopt an adaptive-depth Mamba-based pose prediction model, where lightweight prediction heads are attached after every layer to enable inference with different model depths. With this unified sensing-computation modeling, we establish a quantitative relationship among sensing power, model depth, and prediction error. Furthermore, we formulate a joint resource allocation problem to minimize the pose prediction error. To solve this problem efficiently, we develop an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm, where closed-form solutions are derived for the sensing power and model depth update steps. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces pose prediction error compared with baseline methods, validating its effectiveness for resource-constrained indoor human-centric ISCC systems.
Multi-Block Attention for Efficient Channel Estimation in IRS-Assisted mmWave MIMO
Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) are a promising technology for enhancing the spectral and energy efficiency of millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In these systems, accurate channel estimation remains challenging due to the passive nature of IRS elements and the high pilot overhead in large-scale deployments. This paper presents a deep learning-based Multi-Block Attention (MBA) framework for efficient cascaded channel estimation in IRS-assisted mmWave MIMO systems that utilize orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). First, we show the optimality of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and Hadamard matrices as phase configurations for least squares (LS) estimation. To reduce training overhead, we selectively deactivate IRS elements and compensate for induced feature loss using a two-stage architecture: (i) a Convolutional Attention Network (CAN) for spatial correlation recovery and (ii) a Complex Multi-Convolutional Network (CMN) for noise suppression. The MBA architecture mitigates error propagation through attention-guided feature refinement and denoising. Simulation results indicate that the MBA method reduces pilot overhead by up to 87% compared to the LS estimator. Additionally, at signal-to-noise ratios of 10 dB, our proposed method achieves approximately 51% lower normalized mean squared error (NMSE) than leading methods. It also maintains low computational complexity and adapts effectively to various propagation environments.
Look Once, Beam Twice: Camera-Primed Real-Time Double-Directional mmWave Beam Management for Vehicular Connectivity
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies promise multi-gigabit connectivity for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks, but face challenges in terms of severe path loss and mobility-related beam misalignment. Reliable V2X connectivity requires fast, double-directional beam alignment. However, existing methods suffer from high training overhead and limited generalization to unseen scenarios. This paper presents VIsion-based BEamforming(VIBE), a hybrid model-based, closed-loop, learning architecture for real-time double-directional mmWave beam management primed by camera sensing. VIBE fuses machine learning, model-based reasoning, and closed-loop RF feedback to balance beam-pair establishment latency with link quality. VIBE bypasses exhaustive training overhead and accelerates link establishment by leveraging camera observations to reduce the beam-search space. Lightweight beam refinement and offset tracking mechanisms adaptively refine beams in response to dynamic application requirements. VIBE is implemented and evaluated across online indoor/outdoor testbeds, public datasets, and real-time vehicular experiments, demonstrating strong generalization capabilities, making it suitable for real-time V2X communication. Comparisons with 5G NR hierarchical beamforming show that VIBE consistently maintains lower outage rates. Furthermore, VIBE outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end ML models for beam selection when evaluated on public datasets and achieves outage rates as low as 1.1-1.4 %. The results show that a hybrid model-based, closed-loop learning architecture is better suited for real-world mmWave vehicular connectivity than end-to-end trained ML models. For reproducibility, we publish our code to https://github.com/UNL-CPN-Lab/Look-Once-Beam-Twice.
Enwar 3.0: An Agentic Multi-Modal LLM Orchestrator for Situation-Aware Beamforming, Blockage Prediction, and Handover Management
Maintaining robust millimeter-wave (mmWave) connectivity in vehicular networks requires real-time adaptation to environmental dynamics, sensor degradation, and link variability. This paper presents Enwar 3.0, an environment-aware reasoning framework that unifies multi-modal sensing, agentic large language models (LLMs), and context-driven model selection for predictive beamforming, blockage detection, and handover management. Building upon prior iterations of Enwar, the proposed architecture integrates a classifier-driven assessment of sensor health with a primed LLM that orchestrates multiple specialized agents through structured, task-aware prompting. A novel synthetic degradation pipeline enables the training of a sensor degradation classifier that detects real-time impairments across camera, radar, LiDAR, and GPS inputs, achieving over 99% accuracy. The LLM, trained via chain-of-thought (CoT) priming and human-in-the-loop feedback, coordinates agent calls for beam selection, blockage forecasting, and environment perception while dynamically loading sensor-specific models based on environmental context. Extensive evaluations across 15 sensor combinations demonstrate that Enwar 3.0 delivers state-of-the-art performance in both predictive accuracy and interpretability, with beam selection accuracy exceeding 88%, blockage F1-scores surpassing 98%, and reasoning correctness reaching 87% on complex decision prompts. This work establishes a scalable foundation for LLM-integrated wireless systems that reason, perceive, and adapt in real-time.
Multi-User mmWave Beam and Rate Adaptation via Combinatorial Satisficing Bandits
We study downlink beam and rate adaptation in a multi-user mmWave MISO system where multiple base stations (BSs), each using analog beamforming from finite codebooks, serve multiple single-antenna user equipments (UEs) with a unique beam per UE and discrete data transmission rates. BSs learn about transmission success based on ACK/NACK feedback. To encode service goals, we introduce a satisficing throughput threshold and cast joint beam and rate adaptation as a combinatorial semi-bandit over beam-rate tuples. Within this framework, we propose SAT-CTS, a lightweight, threshold-aware policy that blends conservative confidence estimates with posterior sampling, steering learning toward meeting rather than merely maximizing. Our main theoretical contribution provides the first finite-time regret bounds for combinatorial semi-bandits with satisficing objective: when is realizable, we upper bound the cumulative satisficing regret to the target with a time-independent constant, and when is non-realizable, we show that SAT-CTS incurs only a finite expected transient outside committed CTS rounds, after which its regret is governed by the sum of the regret contributions of restarted CTS rounds, yielding an standard regret bound. On the practical side, we evaluate the performance via cumulative satisficing regret to alongside standard regret and fairness. Experiments with time-varying sparse multipath channels show that SAT-CTS consistently reduces satisficing regret and maintains competitive standard regret, while achieving favorable average throughput and fairness across users, indicating that feedback-efficient learning can equitably allocate beams and rates to meet QoS targets without channel state knowledge.
Diffusion-Based Generative Priors for Efficient Beam Alignment in Directional Networks
Beam alignment is a key challenge in directional mmWave and THz systems, where narrow beams require accurate yet low-overhead training. Existing learning-based approaches typically predict a single beam and do not quantify uncertainty, limiting adaptive beam sweeping. We recast beam alignment as a generative task and propose a conditional diffusion model that learns a probabilistic beam prior from compact geometric and multipath features. The learned priors guide top- sweeps and capture the SNR loss induced by limited probing. Using a ray-traced DeepMIMO scenario with an 8-beam DFT codebook, our best conditional diffusion model achieves strong ranking performance (Hit@1 , Hit@3 , Hit@5 ) while preserving SNR at small sweep budgets. Compared with a deterministic classifier baseline, diffusion improves Hit@1 by about 180%. Results further highlight the importance of informative conditioning and the ability of diffusion sampling to flexibly trade accuracy for computational efficiency. The proposed diffusion framework achieves substantial improvements in small- Hit rates, translating into reduced beam training overhead and enabling low-latency, energy-efficient beam alignment for mmWave and THz systems while preserving received SNR.
Agentic AI for Embodied-enhanced Beam Prediction in Low-Altitude Economy Networks
Millimeter-wave or terahertz communications can meet demands of low-altitude economy networks for high-throughput sensing and real-time decision making. However, high-frequency characteristics of wireless channels result in severe propagation loss and strong beam directivity, which make beam prediction challenging in highly mobile uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) scenarios. In this paper, we employ agentic AI to enable the transformation of mmWave base stations toward embodied intelligence. We innovatively design a multi-agent collaborative reasoning architecture for UAV-to-ground mmWave communications and propose a hybrid beam prediction model system based on bimodal data. The multi-agent architecture is designed to overcome the limited context window and weak controllability of large language model (LLM)-based reasoning by decomposing beam prediction into task analysis, solution planning, and completeness assessment. To align with the agentic reasoning process, a hybrid beam prediction model system is developed to process multimodal UAV data, including numeric mobility information and visual observations. The proposed hybrid model system integrates Mamba-based temporal modelling, convolutional visual encoding, and cross-attention-based multimodal fusion, and dynamically switches data-flow strategies under multi-agent guidance. Extensive simulations on a real UAV mmWave communication dataset demonstrate that proposed architecture and system achieve high prediction accuracy and robustness under diverse data conditions, with maximum top-1 accuracy reaching 96.57%.
Taming Vision Priors for Data Efficient mmWave Channel Modeling
Accurately modeling millimeter-wave (mmWave) propagation is essential for real-time AR and autonomous systems. Differentiable ray tracing offers a physics-grounded solution but still facing deployment challenges due to its over-reliance on exhaustive channel measurements or brittle, hand-tuned scene models for material properties. We present VisRFTwin, a scalable and data-efficient digital-twin framework that integrates vision-derived material priors with differentiable ray tracing. Multi-view images from commodity cameras are processed by a frozen Vision-Language Model to extract dense semantic embeddings, which are translated into initial estimates of permittivity and conductivity for scene surfaces. These priors initialize a Sionna-based differentiable ray tracer, which rapidly calibrates material parameters via gradient descent with only a few dozen sparse channel soundings. Once calibrated, the association between vision features and material parameters is retained, enabling fast transfer to new scenarios without repeated calibration. Evaluations across three real-world scenarios, including office interiors, urban canyons, and dynamic public spaces show that VisRFTwin reduces channel measurement needs by up to 10 while achieving a 59% lower median delay spread error than pure data-driven deep learning methods.
Learning to Reflect: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for CSI-Free mmWave Beam-Focusing
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces promise to transform wireless environments, yet practical deployment is hindered by the prohibitive overhead of Channel State Information (CSI) estimation and the dimensionality explosion inherent in centralized optimization. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HMARL) framework for the control of mechanically reconfigurable reflective surfaces in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. We introduce a "CSI-free" paradigm that substitutes pilot-based channel estimation with readily available user localization data. To manage the massive combinatorial action space, the proposed architecture utilizes Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) under a Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) paradigm. The proposed architecture decomposes the control problem into two abstraction levels: a high-level controller for user-to-reflector allocation and decentralized low-level controllers for low-level focal point optimization. Comprehensive ray-tracing evaluations demonstrate that the framework achieves 2.81-7.94 dB RSSI improvements over centralized baselines, with the performance advantage widening as system complexity increases. Scalability analysis reveals that the system maintains sustained efficiency, exhibiting minimal per-user performance degradation and stable total power utilization even when user density doubles. Furthermore, robustness validation confirms the framework's viability across varying reflector aperture sizes (45-99 tiles) and demonstrates graceful performance degradation under localization errors up to 0.5 m. By eliminating CSI overhead while maintaining high-fidelity beam-focusing, this work establishes HMARL as a practical solution for intelligent mmWave environments.
Enhancing User Throughput in Multi-panel mmWave Radio Access Networks for Beam-based MU-MIMO Using a DRL Method
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems, particularly those leveraging multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) with hybrid beamforming, face challenges in optimizing user throughput and minimizing latency due to the high complexity of dynamic beam selection and management. This paper introduces a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach for enhancing user throughput in multi-panel mmWave radio access networks in a practical network setup. Our DRL-based formulation utilizes an adaptive beam management strategy that models the interaction between the communication agent and its environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), optimizing beam selection based on real-time observations. The proposed framework exploits spatial domain (SD) characteristics by incorporating the cross-correlation between the beams in different antenna panels, the measured reference signal received power (RSRP), and the beam usage statistics to dynamically adjust beamforming decisions. As a result, the spectral efficiency is improved and end-to-end latency is reduced. The numerical results demonstrate an increase in throughput of up to 16% and a reduction in latency by factors 3-7x compared to baseline (legacy beam management).