AI/ML in 5G Beam Management 2026: Adaptive Beamforming, Rel-18 & Rel-19 Innovations
AI/ML in 5G Beam Management 2026: Adaptive Beamforming, Rel-18 & Rel-19 Innovations At mmWave frequencies (FR2), the gNB and UE must form highly directional transmission links to secure adequate link budget — this precise alignment of transmitter and receiver beams is what beam management (BM) does. The challenge is that traditional exhaustive beam sweeping over predefined codebooks incurs high overhead, particularly with large antenna arrays. With 64–256 antenna elements in a typical massive MIMO gNB, scanning all beam pairs sequentially is slow, expensive in reference signal overhead, and power-hungry for the UE. Use of AL-ML in 5G: Adaptive beamforming & beam management in 5G The legacy 3GPP procedures (Rel-15–17) The baseline beam management framework was introduced in Rel-15 and uses three procedures defined in TS 38.331 and TS 38.213: P1 (cell/beam sweeping using SSB or CSI-RS for initial access), P2 (beam refinement within a selected beam pair), and P3 (UE receive beam a...