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Beamforming techniques are considered as essential parts to compensate severe path losses in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. In particular, these techniques adopt large antenna arrays and formulate narrow beams to obtain satisfactory received powers. However, performing accurate beam alignment over narrow beams for efficient link configuration by traditional standard defined beam selection approaches, which mainly rely on channel state information and beam sweeping through exhaustive searching, imposes computational and communications overheads. And, such resulting overheads limit their potential use in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications involving highly dynamic scenarios. In comparison, utilizing out-of-band contextual information, such as sensing data obtained from sensor devices, provides a better alternative to reduce overheads. This paper presents a deep learning-based solution for utilizing the multi-modality sensing data for predicting the optimal beams having sufficient mmWave received powers so that the best V2I and V2V line-of-sight links can be ensured proactively. The proposed solution has been tested on real-world measured mmWave sensing and communication data, and the results show that it can achieve up to 98.19% accuracies while predicting top-13 beams. Correspondingly, when compared to existing been sweeping approach, the beam sweeping searching space and time overheads are greatly shortened roughly by 79.67% and 91.89%, respectively which confirm a promising solution for beamforming in mmWave enabled communications. 

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) will revolutionize tomorrow’s intelligent transportation systems, being considered promising to improve transportation safety, traffic efficiency, and mobility. In fact, envisioned use cases of CAVs demand very high throughput, lower latency, highly reliable communications, and precise positioning capabilities. The availability of a large spectrum at millimeter-wave (mmWave) band potentially promotes new specifications in spectrum technologies capable of supporting such service requirements. In this article, we specifically focus on how mmWave communications are being approached in vehicular standardization activities, CAVs use cases and deployment challenges in realizing the future fully connected settings. Finally, we also present a detailed performance assessment on mmWave-enabled vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) cooperative perception as an example case study to show the impact of different configurations.