Map-Driven Mmwave Link Quality Prediction With Spatial-Temporal Mobility Awareness

The susceptibility of millimeter-wave (mmWave) links to blockages poses challenges for maintaining consistent high-rate performance. By predicting link quality in advance at specific locations or times of interest, proactive resource allocation techniques, such as link-quality-aware scheduling, can be employed to optimize the utilization of network resources. In this paper, we introduce a map-driven link quality prediction framework that divides the problem into long-term and short-term link quality predictions to cater to the needs of mobile computing. The first stage aims to predict a long-term radio map considering static network characteristics. We propose to separate LoS and NLoS scenarios, and build an analytical model and a regression-based approach to construct a complete link quality map in the spatial domain. Next, short-term link quality prediction is explored to anticipate future variations in link quality through a spatial-temporal attention-based prediction framework. The essence of this approach lies in capturing the spatial correlation and temporal dependency of mmWave wireless characteristics, followed by an attention mechanism to complement the dynamic link quality prediction task. On top of that, we also design a regional training mechanism with a weighted loss function to address the classical data imbalance problem of map-driven prediction. Extensive experimental and simulation results show that our integrated framework effectively captures comprehensive spatial-temporal knowledge and achieves significantly higher accuracy than other baseline prediction methods, making it a promising solution for a wide range proactive configuration tasks in mobile mmWave networks.