Performance Analysis of Ray Tracing Assisted Beamforming Techniques for future mm-wave wireless systems

Abstract—The use of large-size antenna arrays to implement pencil-beam forming techniques is becoming a key asset to cope with the very high throughput density requirements and high path-loss of future
millimeter-wave (mm-wave) gigabit-wireless applications. Suboptimal beamforming (BF) strategies based < Final Year Project >
on search over discrete set of beams (steering vectors) are proposed and implemented in present standards
and applications. The potential of fully adaptive advanced BF strategies that will become possible in the
future, thanks to the availability of accurate localization and powerful distributed computing, is evaluated in
this paper through system simulation. After validation and calibration against mm-wave directional indoor
channel measurements, a 3-D ray tracing model is used as a propagation-prediction engine to evaluate
performance in a number of simple, reference cases. Ray tracing itself, however, is proposed and evaluated
as a real-time prediction tool to assist future BF techniques.