Abstract
Next generation wireless systems will rely on the use of the millimeter-wave (mmWaves) band for low latency and high-rate data transfer. To combat the high pathloss at the mmWave frequencies, these systems will employ directional precoding at both the transmitter and the receiver. Obtaining the best communication beam pair for data transfer can be challenging, however, as mmWave signals have narrow beam width and need time to perform beam alignment. This usually results in an exhaustive search over 360 degrees to find the optimal transmit/receive beam indices. To minizine the transmission beam alignment time and complexity, this project investigates several communication beam alignment techniques and proposes a simple inverted hierarchical search technique. MATLAB simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed beam alignment technique when compared to other exhaustive and sub-optimal beam alignment techniques.