Beam Management
The set of L1/L2 procedures for acquiring and maintaining optimal beam pair links between gNB and UE, including beam sweeping, measurement, reporting, and beam failure recovery.
Beam management is the reason mmWave works at all. At those frequencies energy has to be concentrated into narrow beams to overcome path loss, but a narrow beam pointed even slightly wrong gives you nothing — so the network and UE constantly hunt for, measure, and maintain the best beam pair. 3GPP frames this around procedures named P-1, P-2 and P-3: P-1 is the initial wide sweep, P-2 refines the gNB-side beam, P-3 refines the UE-side beam.
The everyday mechanics: the gNB transmits beamformed reference signals (SSBs or CSI-RS), the UE measures L1-RSRP per beam and reports the best ones, and the network points data and control at the winning beam via a TCI state. When the serving beam degrades — someone walks between the UE and the panel, a classic mmWave failure — beam failure detection trips and the UE runs beam failure recovery to grab a new candidate before the link drops. Done well, all of this is invisible; done poorly, you get the stuttering throughput mmWave is notorious for.
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