Unsupervised LoS/NLoS identification in mmWave communication using two-stage machine learning framework

Identification of line-of-sight (LoS)/ non-LoS (NLoS) condition in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is important for localization and unobstructed transmission between a base station (BS) and a user. A sudden obstruction in a link between a BS and a user can result in poorly received signal strength or termination of communication. Channel features obtained by the estimation of channel state information (CSI) of a user at the BS can be used for identifying LoS/NLoS condition. With the assumption of labeled CSI, existing machine learning (ML) methods have achieved satisfactory performance for LoS/NLoS identification. However, in a real communication environment, labeled CSI is not available. In this paper, we propose a two-stage unsupervised ML based LoS/NLoS identification framework to address the lack of labeled data. We conduct experiments for the outdoor scenario by generating data from the NYUSIM simulator. We compare the performance of our method with the supervised deep neural network (SDNN) in terms of accuracy and receiver characteristic curves. The proposed framework can achieve an accuracy of 87.4% and it outperforms SDNN. Further, we compare the performance of our method with other state-of-the-art LoS/NLoS identification schemes in terms of accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score.