No Arabic abstract
Millimeter wave wireless spectrum deployments will allow vehicular communications to share high data rate vehicular sensor data in real-time. The highly directional nature of wireless links in millimeter spectral bands will require continuous channel measurements to ensure the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) beams are aligned to provide the best channel. Using real-world vehicular mmWave measurement data at 28 GHz, we determine the optimal beam sweeping period, i.e. the frequency of the channel measurements, to align the RX beams to the best channel directions for maximizing the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) throughput. We show that in a realistic vehicular traffic environment in Austin, TX, for a vehicle traveling at an average speed of 10.5 mph, a beam sweeping period of 300 ms in future V2I communication standards would maximize the V2I throughput, using a system of four RX phased arrays that scanned the channel 360 degrees in the azimuth and 30 degrees above and below the boresight. We also investigate the impact of the number of active RX chains controlling the steerable phased arrays on V2I throughput. Reducing the number of RX chains controlling the phased arrays helps reduce the cost of the vehicular mmWave hardware while multiple RX chains, although more expensive, provide more robustness to beam direction changes at the vehicle, allowing near maximum throughput over a wide range of beam sweep periods. We show that the overhead of utilizing one RX chain instead of four leads to a 10% drop in mean V2I throughput over six non-line-of-sight runs in real traffic conditions, with each run being 10 to 20 seconds long over a distance of 40 to 90 meters.
Wireless networks with directional antennas, like millimeter wave (mmWave) networks, have enhanced security. For a large-scale mmWave ad hoc network in which eavesdroppers are randomly located, however, eavesdroppers can still intercept the confidential messages, since they may reside in the signal beam. This paper explores the potential of physical layer security in mmWave ad hoc networks. Specifically, we characterize the impact of mmWave channel characteristics, random blockages, and antenna gains on the secrecy performance. For the special case of uniform linear array (ULA), a tractable approach is proposed to evaluate the average achievable secrecy rate. We also characterize the impact of artificial noise in such networks. Our results reveal that in the low transmit powerregime, the use of low mmWave frequency achieves better secrecy performance, and when increasing transmit power, a transition from low mmWave frequency to high mmWave frequency is demanded for obtaining a higher secrecy rate. More antennas at the transmitting nodes are needed to decrease the antenna gain obtained by the eavesdroppers when using ULA. Eavesdroppers can intercept more information by using a wide beam pattern. Furthermore, the use of artificial noise may be ineffective for enhancing the secrecy rate.
The performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is limited by the sparse nature of propagation channels and the restricted number of radio frequency (RF) chains at transceivers. The introduction of reconfigurable antennas offers an additional degree of freedom on designing mmWave MIMO systems. This paper provides a theoretical framework for studying the mmWave MIMO with reconfigurable antennas. Based on the virtual channel model, we present an architecture of reconfigurable mmWave MIMO with beamspace hybrid analog-digital beamformers and reconfigurable antennas at both the transmitter and the receiver. We show that employing reconfigurable antennas can provide throughput gain for the mmWave MIMO. We derive the expression for the average throughput gain of using reconfigurable antennas in the system, and further derive the expression for the outage throughput gain for the scenarios where the channels are (quasi) static. Moreover, we propose a low-complexity algorithm for reconfiguration state selection and beam selection. Our numerical results verify the derived expressions for the throughput gains and demonstrate the near-optimal throughput performance of the proposed low-complexity algorithm.
Beamforming structures with fixed beam codebooks provide economical solutions for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications due to the low hardware cost. However, the training overhead to search for the optimal beamforming configuration is proportional to the codebook size. To improve the efficiency of beam tracking, we propose a beam tracking scheme based on the channel fingerprint database, which comprises mappings between statistical beamforming gains and user locations. The scheme tracks user movement by utilizing the trained beam configurations and estimating the gains of beam configurations that are not trained. Simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves significant beamforming performance gains over existing beam tracking schemes.
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a promising technology for the fifth-generation (5G) wireless system. However, the large number of antennas used and the wide signal bandwidth in mmWave systems render the conventional multi-antenna techniques increasingly costly in terms of signal processing complexity, hardware implementation, and power consumption. In this article, we investigate cost-effective mmWave communications by first providing an overview of the main existing techniques that offer different trade-offs between performance and cost, and then focusing our discussion on a promising new technique based on the advanced lens antenna array. It is revealed that by exploiting the angle-dependent energy focusing property of lens arrays, together with the angular sparsity of the mmWave channels, mmWave lens-antenna system is able to achieve the capacity-optimal performance with very few radio-frequency (RF) chains and using the low-complexity single-carrier transmission, even for wide-band frequency-selective channels. Numerical results show that the lens-based system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art designs for mmWave systems in both spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency.
The wide bandwidth and large number of antennas used in millimeter wave systems put a heavy burden on the power consumption at the receiver. In this paper, using an additive quantization noise model, the effect of analog-digital conversion (ADC) resolution and bandwidth on the achievable rate is investigated for a multi-antenna system under a receiver power constraint. Two receiver architectures, analog and digital combining, are compared in terms of performance. Results demonstrate that: (i) For both analog and digital combining, there is a maximum bandwidth beyond which the achievable rate decreases; (ii) Depending on the operating regime of the system, analog combiner may have higher rate but digital combining uses less bandwidth when only ADC power consumption is considered, (iii) digital combining may have higher rate when power consumption of all the components in the receiver front-end are taken into account.