  A beam codebook of 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) for data communication
consists of multiple high-peak-gain beams to compensate the high pathloss at
the mmWave bands. These beams also have to point to different angular
directions, such that by performing beam searching over the codebook, a good
mmWave signal coverage over the full sphere around the terminal (spherical
coverage) can be achieved. A model-based beam codebook design that assumes
ideal omni-directional antenna pattern, and neglects the impact of terminal
housing around the antenna, does not work well because the radiation pattern of
a practical mmWave antenna combined with the impact of terminal housing is
highly irregular. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient data-driven
method to generate a beam codebook to boost the spherical coverage of mmWave
terminals. The method takes as inputs the measured or simulated electric field
response data of each antenna and provides the codebook according to the
requirements on the codebook size, spherical coverage, etc. The method can be
applied in a straightforward manner to different antenna type, antenna array
configuration, placement and terminal housing design. Our simulation results
show that the proposed method generates a codebook better than the benchmark
and 802.15.3c codebooks in terms of the spherical coverage.
