No Arabic abstract
With the increasing demand of ultra-high-speed wireless communications and the existing low frequency band (e.g., sub-6GHz) becomes more and more crowded, millimeter-wave (mmWave) with large spectra available is considered as the most promising frequency band for future wireless communications. Since the mmWave suffers a serious path-loss, beamforming techniques shall be adopted to concentrate the transmit power and receive region on a narrow beam for achieving long distance communications. However, the mobility of users will bring frequent beam handoff, which will decrease the quality of experience (QoE). Therefore, efficient beam tracking mechanism should be carefully researched. However, the existing beam tracking mechanisms concentrate on system throughput maximization without considering beam handoff and link robustness. This paper proposes a throughput and robustness guaranteed beam tracking mechanism for mobile mmWave communication systems which takes account of both system throughput and handoff probability. Simulation results show that the proposed throughput and robustness guaranteed beam tracking mechanism can provide better performance than the other beam tracking mechanisms.
As low frequency band becomes more and more crowded, millimeter-wave (mmWave) has attracted significant attention recently. IEEE has released the 802.11ad standard to satisfy the demand of ultra-high-speed communication. It adopts beamforming technology that can generate directional beams to compensate for high path loss. In the Association Beamforming Training (A-BFT) phase of beamforming (BF) training, a station (STA) randomly selects an A-BFT slot to contend for training opportunity. Due to the limited number of A-BFT slots, A-BFT phase suffers high probability of collisions in dense user scenarios, resulting in inefficient training performance. Based on the evaluation of the IEEE 802.11ad standard and 802.11ay draft in dense user scenarios of mmWave wireless networks, we propose an enhanced A-BFT beam training and random access mechanism, including the Separated A-BFT (SA-BFT) and Secondary Backoff A-BFT (SBA-BFT). The SA-BFT can provide more A-BFT slots and divide A-BFT slots into two regions by defining a new `E-A-BFT Length field compared to the legacy 802.11ad A-BFT, thereby maintaining compatibility when 802.11ay devices are mixed with 802.11ad devices. It can also reduce the collision probability in dense user scenarios greatly. The SBA-BFT performs secondary backoff with very small overhead of transmission opportunities within one A-BFT slot, which not only further reduces collision probability, but also improves the A-BFT slots utilization. Furthermore, we propose a three-dimensional Markov model to analyze the performance of the SBA-BFT. The analytical and simulation results show that both the SA-BFT and the SBA-BFT can significantly improve BF training efficiency, which are beneficial to the optimization design of dense user wireless networks based on the IEEE 802.11ay standard and mmWave technology.
We consider a data aggregating wireless network where all nodes have data to send to a single destination node, the sink. We consider a linear placement of nodes with the sink at one end. The nodes communicate directly to the sink (single hop transmission) and we assume that the nodes are scheduled one at a time by a central scheduler (possibly the sink). The wireless nodes are power limited and our network objective (notion of fairness) is to maximize the minimum throughput of the nodes subject to the node power constraints. In this work, we consider network designs that permit adapting node transmission time, node transmission power and node placements, and study cross- layer strategies that seek to maximize the network throughput. Using simulations, we characterize the performance of the dif- ferent strategies and comment on their applicability for various network scenarios.
Highly directional millimeter wave (mmWave) radios need to perform beam management to establish and maintain reliable links. To do so, existing solutions mostly rely on explicit coordination between the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX), which significantly reduces the airtime available for communication and further complicates the network protocol design. This paper advances the state of the art by presenting DeepBeam, a framework for beam management that does not require pilot sequences from the TX, nor any beam sweeping or synchronization from the RX. This is achieved by inferring (i) the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of the beam and (ii) the actual beam being used by the transmitter through waveform-level deep learning on ongoing transmissions between the TX to other receivers. In this way, the RX can associate Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) levels to beams without explicit coordination with the TX. This is possible because different beam patterns introduce different impairments to the waveform, which can be subsequently learned by a convolutional neural network (CNN). We conduct an extensive experimental data collection campaign where we collect more than 4 TB of mmWave waveforms with (i) 4 phased array antennas at 60.48 GHz, (ii) 2 codebooks containing 24 one-dimensional beams and 12 two-dimensional beams; (iii) 3 receiver gains; (iv) 3 different AoAs; (v) multiple TX and RX locations. Moreover, we collect waveform data with two custom-designed mmWave software-defined radios with fully-digital beamforming architectures at 58 GHz. Results show that DeepBeam (i) achieves accuracy of up to 96%, 84% and 77% with a 5-beam, 12-beam and 24-beam codebook, respectively; (ii) reduces latency by up to 7x with respect to the 5G NR initial beam sweep in a default configuration and with a 12-beam codebook. The waveform dataset and the full DeepBeam code repository are publicly available.
Air traffic management (ATM) of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles (AVs) relies critically on ubiquitous location tracking. While technologies exist for AVs to broadcast their location periodically and for airports to track and detect AVs, methods to verify the broadcast locations and complement the ATM coverage are urgently needed, addressing anti-spoofing and safe coexistence concerns. In this work, we propose an ATM solution by exploiting noncoherent crowdsourced wireless networks (CWNs) and correcting the inherent clock-synchronization problems present in such non-coordinated sensor networks. While CWNs can provide a great number of measurements for ubiquitous ATM, these are normally obtained from unsynchronized sensors. This article first presents an analysis of the effects of lack of clock synchronization in ATM with CWN and provides solutions based on the presence of few trustworthy sensors in a large non-coordinated network. Secondly, autoregressive-based and long short-term memory (LSTM)-based approaches are investigated to achieve the time synchronization needed for localization of the AVs. Finally, a combination of a multilateration (MLAT) method and a Kalman filter is employed to provide an anti-spoofing tracking solution for AVs. We demonstrate the performance advantages of our framework through a dataset collected by a real-world CWN. Our results show that the proposed framework achieves localization accuracy comparable to that acquired using only GPS-synchronized sensors and outperforms the localization accuracy obtained based on state-of-the-art CWN synchronization methods.
The performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications critically depends on the accuracy of beamforming both at base station (BS) and user terminals (UEs) due to high isotropic path-loss and channel attenuation. In high mobility environments, accurate beam alignment becomes even more challenging as the angles of the BS and each UE must be tracked reliably and continuously. In this work, focusing on the beamforming at the BS, we propose an adaptive method based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) that tracks and predicts the Angle of Departure (AoD) of a given UE. Moreover, we propose a modified frame structure to reduce beam alignment overhead and hence increase the communication rate. Our numerical experiments in a highly non-linear mobility scenario show that our proposed method is able to track the AoD accurately and achieve higher communication rate compared to more traditional methods such as the particle filter.