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5G New Radio (NR) mmWave operates with narrow beams. Beam-based connections require careful management of beams to ensure a reliable connection, specially when the user has mobility. 5G NR defines beam management procedures to achieve this, at the expense of periodic reporting with increased overheads and resource usage. Concurrently, recent interest in sensing for assisting wireless systems provides an opportunity to extract situational awareness information which can aid in proactive decisions for the network. In this work, we utilize an infrastructure-mounted light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor system simultaneously operating with the wireless system to predict future beam decisions. A recurrent neural network (RNN) based learning model is proposed for the beam prediction, employing tracking information of users facilitated by the LiDARs and beam sequence information from the wireless system. Furthermore, a method for predictive beam management with increased periodicity of the reporting mechanism and aperiodic reporting is analyzed. The results for the considered scenario reveal 86.8% of the resources can be saved compared to the conventional beam reporting procedure, while achieving an 88.7% accuracy for optimal beam decisions.

The mmWave communication up to 71 GHz is already specified in 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP)5G New Radio (NR), and communication in sub-THz bands is being studied for 6G widely in the academia and industry. Operation with very narrow beamwidths and much higher bandwidths in contrast to Frequency Range 1 (sub-6 GHz) can cater to the high data rate requirements at the expense of extra signal processing burden to overcome the unfavourable conditions such as high attenuation and scattering in the presence of obstacles. Such severe signal power attenuation caused by an obstacle may degrade the network performance due to link failures occurring as a result of line-of-sight (LoS) to non-LoS (NLoS) transitions. These limitations raise the necessity of a sensing system to collect situational awareness data to assist the wireless communication network. This work proposes a method to improve the LoS detection and user localization accuracy using multiple light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors co-located in access points (APs). We also propose an approach to predict the LoS transitions based on static LiDAR maps and the proposed method detected the LoS transition 400ms before its occurrence.