Dynamic Obstacles Tracking in mmWave Networks

The advent of fifth generation communication networks has led to novel opportunities and problems that were absent in legacy networks. Stringent line-of-sight demands necessitated by fast attenuating nature of millimeter waves (mmWave) through obstacles, pose to be one of the central problems of the field. mmWave links are easily disrupted due to obstacles, both static and dynamic. Handling static obstacles is easy, while dynamic obstacles are usually tracked by expensive additional hardware like cameras and radars, which undoubtedly lead to increased deployment costs. In this manuscript, we propose a novel approach to estimate the trajectories of multiple dynamic obstacles in an ultra dense mmWave network, solely based on link failure information, without resorting to any specialized tracking hardware. We keep a track of link failures over a short window of time and use that knowledge to extrapolate the trajectories of dynamic obstacles. After proving its NP-completeness, we employ a greedy set cover based approach for this. We then use the obtained trajectories to tag upcoming links as per their blockage possibility. We simulate on real world data to validate our approach based on its accuracy, sensitivity, and precision. Our approach is also shown to outperform an existing one.