No Arabic abstract
The requirement of high data-rate in the fifth generation wireless systems (5G) calls for the ultimate utilization of the wide bandwidth in the mmWave frequency band. Researchers seeking to compensate for mmWaves high path loss and to achieve both gain and directivity have proposed that mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems make use of beamforming systems. Hybrid beamforming in mmWave demonstrates promising performance in achieving high gain and directivity by using phase shifters at the analog processing block. What remains a problem, however, is the actual implementation of mmWave beamforming systems; to fabricate such a system is costly and complex. With the aim of reducing such cost and complexity, this article presents actual prototypes of the lens antenna as an effective device to be used in the future 5G mmWave hybrid beamforming systems. Using a lens as a passive phase shifter enables beamforming without the heavy network of active phase shifters, while gain and directivity are achieved by the energy-focusing property of the lens. Proposed in this article are two types of lens antennas, one for static and the other for mobile usage. Their performance is evaluated using measurements and simulation data along with link-level analysis via a software defined radio (SDR) platform. Results show the promising potential of the lens antenna for its high gain and directivity, and its improved beam-switching feasibility compared to when a lens is not used. System-level evaluations reveal the significant throughput enhancement in both real indoor and outdoor environments. Moreover, the lens antennas design issues are also discussed by evaluating different lens sizes.
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can shape the radio propagation by passively changing the directions of impinging electromagnetic waves. The optimal control of the RIS requires perfect channel state information (CSI) of all the links connecting the base station (BS) and the mobile station (MS) via the RIS. Thereby the channel (parameter) estimation at the BS/MS and the related message feedback mechanism are needed. In this paper, we adopt a two-stage channel estimation scheme for the RIS-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO channels using an iterative reweighted method to sequentially estimate the channel parameters. We evaluate the average spectrum efficiency (SE) and the RIS beamforming gain of the proposed scheme and demonstrate that it achieves high-resolution estimation with the average SE comparable to that with perfect CSI.
Location information offered by external positioning systems, e.g., satellite navigation, can be used as prior information in the process of beam alignment and channel parameter estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output networks. Benefiting from the availability of such prior information, albeit imperfect, the beam alignment and channel parameter estimation processes can be significantly accelerated with less candidate beams explored at all the terminals. We propose a practical channel parameter estimation method via atomic norm minimization, which outperforms the standard beam alignment in terms of both the mean square error and the effective spectrum efficiency for the same training overhead.
MIMO transmit arrays allow for flexible design of the transmit beampattern. However, the large number of elements required to achieve certain performance using uniform linear arrays (ULA) maybe be too costly. This motivated the need for thinned arrays by appropriately selecting a small number of elements so that the full array beampattern is preserved. In this paper, we propose Learn-to-Select (L2S), a novel machine learning model for selecting antennas from a dense ULA employing a combination of multiple Softmax layers constrained by an orthogonalization criterion. The proposed approach can be efficiently scaled for larger problems as it avoids the combinatorial explosion of the selection problem. It also offers a flexible array design framework as the selection problem can be easily formulated for any metric.
Radio frequency (RF) chain circuits play a major role in digital receiver architectures, allowing passband communication signals to be processed in baseband. When operating at high frequencies, these circuits tend to be costly. This increased cost imposes a major limitation on future multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication technologies. A common approach to mitigate the increased cost is to utilize hybrid architectures, in which the received signal is combined in analog into a lower dimension, thus reducing the number of RF chains. In this work we study the design and hardware implementation of hybrid architectures via minimizing channel estimation error. We first derive the optimal solution for complex-gain combiners and propose an alternating optimization algorithm for phase-shifter combiners. We then present a hardware prototype implementing analog combining for RF chain reduction. The prototype consists of a specially designed configurable combining board as well as a dedicated experimental setup. Our hardware prototype allows evaluating the effect of analog combining in MIMO systems using actual communication signals. The experimental study, which focuses on channel estimation accuracy in MIMO channels, demonstrates that using the proposed prototype, the achievable channel estimation performance is within a small gap in a statistical sense from that obtained using a costly receiver in which each antenna is connected to a dedicated RF chain.
A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can shape the radio propagation environment by virtue of changing the impinging electromagnetic waves towards any desired directions, thus, breaking the general Snells reflection law. However, the optimal control of the RIS requires perfect channel state information (CSI) of the individual channels that link the base station (BS) and the mobile station (MS) to each other via the RIS. Thereby super-resolution channel (parameter) estimation needs to be efficiently conducted at the BS or MS with CSI feedback to the RIS controller. In this paper, we adopt a two-stage channel estimation scheme for RIS-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO systems without a direct BS-MS channel, using atomic norm minimization to sequentially estimate the channel parameters, i.e., angular parameters, angle differences, and products of propagation path gains. We evaluate the mean square error of the parameter estimates, the RIS gains, the average effective spectrum efficiency bound, and average squared distance between the designed beamforming and combining vectors and the optimal ones. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves super-resolution estimation compared to the existing benchmark schemes, thus offering promising performance in the subsequent data transmission phase.