Toward B5G/6G Connected Autonomous Vehicles: O-RAN-Driven Millimeter-Wave Beam Management and Handover Management

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are crucial to a future society that embraces advanced technologies. For these vehicles to effectively share information with nearby vehicles or infrastructures through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) interfaces, stable mmWave communication is essential yet challenging. This paper presents an innovative approach to millimeter-wave beam management for CAVs, utilizing open radio access network (O-RAN) architecture to improve beam and handover efficiency in diverse road scenarios. Our approach uniquely combines CAV application data with mobility management to predict vehicles' location. Our findings show that this method substantially surpasses the traditional beam sweeping method by consistently maintaining a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), even in challenging scenarios such as vehicle obstruction at intersections. This research underscores the potential of integrating O-RAN with vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication in CAVs, paving the way for future advancements in autonomous transportation technology.