Adaptive Beam Management for Secure mmWave Communication

Abstract

Millimeter wave systems leverage beamforming to generate narrow, high-powered beams for overcoming the increased path loss in the millimeter wave spectrum. These beams are spa- tially confined, making millimeter wave links more resilient to eavesdropping and jamming attacks. However, the millimeter wave radios locate each other and establish communica- tion by exhaustively probing all possible angular directions, increasing their susceptibility to attacks. In this thesis, we showcase a secure beam management solution where we apply an adaptive beam management procedure that avoids probing the directions of potential attackers. We employ a reinforcement learning agent to control the probing and dynami- cally restrict sweeps to a subset of beams in the millimeter wave transmitter codebook to avoid the locations of potential attackers based on a proposed metric that quantifies the beam sweeping secrecy over a pre-defined area. We evaluate our proposed system through numerical simulations and an experimental real-life implementation on the CCI xG Testbed.