Vision-Assisted Millimeter-Wave Beam Management for Next-Generation Wireless Systems: Concepts, Solutions, and Open Challenges

Beamforming techniques have been widely used in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) bands to mitigate the path loss of mm-wave radio links as narrow straight beams by directionally concentrating the signal energy. However, traditional mm-wave beam management algorithms usually require excessive channel state information (CSI) overhead, leading to extremely high computational and communication costs. This hinders the widespread deployment of mm-wave communications. By contrast, the revolutionary vision-assisted beam management system concept employed at base stations (BSs) can select the optimal beam for the target user equipment (UE), based on location information determined by machine learning (ML) algorithms applied to visual data, without requiring channel information. In this article, we present a comprehensive framework for a vision-assisted mm-wave beam management system, its typical deployment scenarios, and the specifics of the framework. Then, some of the challenges faced by this system and their efficient solutions are discussed from the perspective of ML. Next, a new simulation platform is conceived to provide both visual and wireless data for model validation and performance evaluation. Our simulation results indicate that vision-assisted beam management is indeed attractive for next-generation wireless systems.