Signalling Design in Sensor-Assisted mmWave Communications for Cooperative Driving

Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V) communications are a key enabler for connected and automated vehicles, as they support the low-latency exchange of control signals and high-resolution imaging data for maneuvering coordination. The employment of mmWave V2V communications calls for Beam Alignment and Tracking (BAT) procedures to ensure that the antenna beams are properly steered during motion. The conventional beam sweeping approach is known to be unsuited for the high vehicular mobility and its large overhead reduces transmission efficiency. A promising solution to reduce BAT signalling foresees the integration of V2V communication systems with on-board vehicle sensors. We focus on a cooperative sensor-assisted architecture for mmWave V2V communications in line of sight, where vehicles exchange the estimate of antenna position and its uncertainty to compute the optimal beam direction and dimension. We analyze and compare different signalling strategies for sharing the information on antenna estimate, evaluating the tradeoff between signalling overhead and performance loss for different position and uncertainty encoding strategies. Main attention is given to differential quantization on both the antenna position and uncertainty. Analyses over realistic urban mobility trajectories suggest that differential approaches introduce a negligible performance loss while significantly reducing the BAT signalling communication overhead.