No Arabic abstract
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a competitive solution to address blockage issues in millimeter wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) communications due to its capability of reshaping wireless transmission environments. Nevertheless, obtaining the channel state information of IRS-assisted systems is quite challenging because of the passive characteristics of the IRS. In this paper, we consider the problem of beam training/alignment for IRS-assisted downlink mmWave/THz systems, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) with a hybrid structure serves a single-antenna user aided by IRS. By exploiting the inherent sparse structure of the BS-IRS-user cascade channel, the beam training problem is formulated as a joint sparse sensing and phaseless estimation problem, which involves devising a sparse sensing matrix and developing an efficient estimation algorithm to identify the best beam alignment from compressive phaseless measurements. Theoretical analysis reveals that the proposed method can identify the best alignment with only a modest amount of training overhead. Simulation results show that, for both line-of-sight (LOS) and NLOS scenarios, the proposed method obtains a significant performance improvement over existing state-of-art methods. Notably, it can achieve performance close to that of the exhaustive beam search scheme, while reducing the training overhead by 95%.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology being considered for future wireless communications due to its ability to control signal propagation. This paper considers the joint active and passive beamforming problem for an IRS-assisted radar, where multiple IRSs are deployed to assist the surveillance of multiple targets in cluttered environments. Specifically, we aim to maximize the minimum target illumination power at multiple target locations by jointly optimizing the active beamformer at the radar transmitter and the passive phase-shift matrices at the IRSs, subject to an upperbound on the clutter power at each clutter scatterer. The resulting optimization problem is nonconvex and solved with a sequential optimization procedure along with semedefinite relaxation (SDR). Simulation results show that IRSs can help create effective line-of-sight (LOS) paths and thus substantially improve the radar robustness against target blockage.
Huge overhead of beam training imposes a significant challenge in millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communications. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a wide beam based training approach to calibrate the narrow beam direction according to the channel power leakage. To handle the complex nonlinear properties of the channel power leakage, deep learning is utilized to predict the optimal narrow beam directly. Specifically, three deep learning assisted calibrated beam training schemes are proposed. The first scheme adopts convolution neural network to implement the prediction based on the instantaneous received signals of wide beam training. We also perform the additional narrow beam training based on the predicted probabilities for further beam direction calibrations. However, the first scheme only depends on one wide beam training, which lacks the robustness to noise. To tackle this problem, the second scheme adopts long-short term memory (LSTM) network for tracking the movement of users and calibrating the beam direction according to the received signals of prior beam training, in order to enhance the robustness to noise. To further reduce the overhead of wide beam training, our third scheme, an adaptive beam training strategy, selects partial wide beams to be trained based on the prior received signals. Two criteria, namely, optimal neighboring criterion and maximum probability criterion, are designed for the selection. Furthermore, to handle mobile scenarios, auxiliary LSTM is introduced to calibrate the directions of the selected wide beams more precisely. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes achieve significantly higher beamforming gain with smaller beam training overhead compared with the conventional and existing deep-learning based counterparts.
In this paper, we consider channel estimation for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, where an IRS is deployed to assist the data transmission from the base station (BS) to a user. It is shown that for the purpose of joint active and passive beamforming, the knowledge of a large-size cascade channel matrix needs to be acquired. To reduce the training overhead, the inherent sparsity in mmWave channels is exploited. By utilizing properties of Katri-Rao and Kronecker products, we find a sparse representation of the cascade channel and convert cascade channel estimation into a sparse signal recovery problem. Simulation results show that our proposed method can provide an accurate channel estimate and achieve a substantial training overhead reduction.
Millimeter-wave is one of the technologies powering the new generation of wireless communication systems. To compensate the high path-loss, millimeter-wave devices need to use highly directional antennas. Consequently, beam misalignment causes strong performance degradation reducing the link throughput or even provoking a complete outage. Conventional solutions, e.g. IEEE 802.11ad, propose the usage of additional training sequences to track beam misalignment. These methods however introduce significant overhead especially in dynamic scenarios. In this paper we propose a beamforming scheme that can reduce this overhead. First, we propose an algorithm to design a codebook suitable for mobile scenarios. Secondly, we propose a blind beam tracking algorithm based on particle filter, which describes the angular position of the devices with a posterior density function constructed by particles. The proposed scheme reduces by more than 80% the overhead caused by additional training sequences.
Covert communication prevents legitimate transmission from being detected by a warden while maintaining certain covert rate at the intended user. Prior works have considered the design of covert communication over conventional low-frequency bands, but few works so far have explored the higher-frequency millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum. The directional nature of mmWave communication makes it attractive for covert transmission. However, how to establish such directional link in a covert manner in the first place remains as a significant challenge. In this paper, we consider a covert mmWave communication system, where legitimate parties Alice and Bob adopt beam training approach for directional link establishment. Accounting for the training overhead, we develop a new design framework that jointly optimizes beam training duration, training power and data transmission power to maximize the effective throughput of Alice-Bob link while ensuring the covertness constraint at warden Willie is met. We further propose a dual-decomposition successive convex approximation algorithm to solve the problem efficiently. Numerical studies demonstrate interesting tradeoff among the key design parameters considered and also the necessity of joint design of beam training and data transmission for covert mmWave communication.