Deep Learning for Fast and Reliable Initial Access in AI-Driven 6G mmWave Networks

We present DeepIA, a deep neural network (DNN) framework for fast and reliable initial access (IA) for artificial intelligence (AI)-driven 6G millimeter wave (mmWave) networks. DeepIA reduces the beam sweep time compared to a conventional exhaustive search-based IA process by utilizing only a subset of the available beams. DeepIA maps received signal strengths (RSSs) obtained from a subset of beams to the beam that is best oriented to the receiver. In both line of sight (LoS) and non-line of sight (NLoS) conditions, DeepIA reduces the IA time and outperforms the conventional IA's beam prediction accuracy. We show that DeepIA's accuracy saturates with the number of beams used, and also depends on the particular choice of the beams used. The choice of beams that are selected is consequential and improves accuracy by up to 35% and 70% in NLoS and LoS channels. We find that, averaging multiple RSS snapshots further reduces the number of beams needed and achieves more than 95% accuracy in both LoS and NLoS conditions. We introduce interference into our models to understand impact on performance. Finally, we evaluate the beam prediction time of DeepIA through embedded hardware implementation and show the improvement over the baseline approach.