Adaptive Codebook Optimization for Beam Training on Off-the-Shelf IEEE 802.11ad Devices

Beamforming is vital to overcome the high attenuation in wireless millimeter-wave networks. It enables nodes to steer their antennas in the direction of communication. To cope with complexity and overhead, the IEEE 802.11ad standard uses a sector codebook with distinct steering directions. In current off-the-shelf devices, we find codebooks with generic pre-defined beam patterns. While this approach is simple and robust, the antenna modules that are typically deployed in such devices are capable of generating much more precise antenna beams. In this paper, we adaptively adjust the sector codebook of IEEE 802.11ad devices to optimize the transmit beam patterns for the current channel. To achieve this, we propose a mechanism to extract full channel state information (CSI) regarding phase and magnitude from coarse signal strength readings on off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11ad devices. Since such devices do not expose the CSI directly, we generate a codebook with phase-shifted probing beams that enables us to obtain the CSI by combining strategically selected magnitude measurements. Using this CSI, transmitters dynamically compute a transmit beam pattern that maximizes the signal strength at the receiver. Thereby, we automatically exploit reflectors in the environment and improve the received signal quality. Our implementation of this mechanism on off-the-shelf devices demonstrates that adaptive codebook optimization achieves a significantly higher throughput of about a factor of two in typical real-world scenarios.