In vehicular networks of the future, sensing and communication functionalities will be intertwined. In this paper, we investigate a radar-assisted predictive beamforming design for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication by exploiting the dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) technique. Aiming for realizing joint sensing and communication functionalities at road side units (RSUs), we present a novel extended Kalman filtering (EKF) framework to track and predict kinematic parameters of each vehicle. By exploiting the radar functionality of the RSU we show that the communication beam tracking overheads can be drastically reduced. To improve the sensing accuracy while guaranteeing the downlink communication sum-rate, we further propose a power allocation scheme for multiple vehicles. Numerical results have shown that the proposed DFRC based beam tracking approach significantly outperforms the communication-only feedback based technique in the tracking performance. Furthermore, the designed power allocation method is able to achieve a favorable performance trade-off between sensing and communication.
In this paper, we develop a predictive beamforming scheme based on the dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) technique, where the road-side units estimates the motion parameters of vehicles exploiting the echoes of the DFRC signals. Compared to the conventional feedback-based beam tracking approaches, the proposed method can reduce the signaling overhead and improve the tracking performance. A novel message passing algorithm is proposed, which yields a near optimal performance achieved by the maximum a posteriori estimation. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed …
Optimized Beamforming and Bandwidth Allocation in Multi-Antenna UAV-Assisted Vehicular Networks
School of Electrical Engineering, Iran University of Science & Technology (IUST)（伊朗理工大学电气工程学院）；School of Computing and Information Technology, Great Bay University（东莞理工学院计算机与信息技术学院）；Great Bay Institute for Advanced Study (GBIAS)（大湾区高等研究院）
The development of dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems, where vehicle localization and tracking can be combined with vehicular communication, will lead to more efficient future vehicular networks. In this paper, we develop a predictive beamforming scheme in the context of DFRC systems. We consider a system model where the road-side units estimates and predicts the motion parameters of vehicles based on the echoes of the DFRC signal. Compared to the conventional feedback-based beam tracking approaches, the proposed method can reduce the signaling overhead and improve the accuracy…
Given its ability to control and manipulate wireless environments, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), has emerged as a key enabler technology for the six-generation (6G) cellular networks. In the meantime, vehicular environment radio propagation is negatively influenced by a large set of objects that cause transmission distortion such as high buildings. Therefore, this work is devoted to explore the area of RIS technology integration with vehicular communications while considering the dynamic nature of such communication environment. S…
This paper investigates the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks. To realize ISAC, an effective beamforming design is essential which however, highly depends on the availability of accurate channel tracking requiring large training overhead and computational complexity. Motivated by this, we adopt a deep learning (DL) approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix to be adopted for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate of an ISAC system. The proposed method …
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to control wireless propagation environment for enhancing the communication performance cost-effectively. However, the rapidly time-varying channel in high-mobility communication scenarios such as vehicular communication renders it challenging to obtain the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) efficiently for IRS with a large number of reflecting elements. In this paper, we propose a new roadside IRS-aided vehicular communication system to tackle this challenge. Specifically, by exploiting the symmetrical deploy…
We investigate the use of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in a millimeter-wave (mmWave) vehicular communication network. An intelligent reflecting surface consists of passive elements, which can reflect the incoming signals with adjustable phase shifts. By properly tuning the phase shifts we can improve link performance. This is known as phase optimization or passive beamforming. We consider the problem of rate maximization in the uplink, which utilizes an IRS. However, using an IRS brings more challenges in terms of channel estimation. We propose two schemes to reduce the channel esti…
Communication and sensing are two important features of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). In traditional vehicle-mounted devices, communication and sensing modules exist but in an isolated way, resulting in a waste of hardware resources and wireless spectrum. In this paper, to cope with the above inefficiency, we propose a vehicular behavior-aware integrated sensing and communication (VBA-ISAC) beamforming design for the vehicle-mounted transmitter with multiple antennas. In this work, beams are steered based on vehicular behaviors to assist driving and meanwhile provide spectral-effic…
The implementation of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) highly depends on the effective beamforming design exploiting accurate instantaneous channel state information (ICSI). However, channel tracking in ISAC requires large amount of training overhead and prohibitively large computational complexity. To address this problem, in this paper, we focus on ISAC-assisted vehicular networks and exploit a deep learning approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate…
Predictive beamforming design is an essential task in realizing high-mobility integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), which highly depends on the accuracy of the channel prediction (CP), i.e., predicting the angular parameters of users. However, the performance of CP highly depends on the estimated historical channel stated information (CSI) with estimation errors, resulting in the performance degradation for most traditional CP methods. To further improve the prediction accuracy, in this paper, we focus on the ISAC in vehicle networks and propose a convolutional long-short term (CLSTM) r…
Vehicular communication is an important application of the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G). Due to its low cost and energy efficiency, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been envisioned as a promising technique that can enhance the coverage performance significantly by passive beamforming. In this paper, we analyze the outage probability performance in IRS-assisted vehicular communication networks. We derive the expression of outage probability by utilizing series expansion and central limit theorem. Numerical results show that the IRS can significantly reduce the o…
In this paper, we propose sensing-assisted beamforming designs for vehicles on arbitrarily shaped roads by relying on integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) signalling.Specifically, we aim to address the limitations of conventional ISAC beam-tracking schemes that do not apply to complex road geometries. To improve the tracking accuracy and communication quality of service (QoS) in vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) networks, it is essential to model the complicated roadway geometry. To that end, we impose the curvilinear coordinate system (CCS) in an interacting multiple model extended Kalma…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) has been claimed to be the only viable solution for high-bandwidth vehicular communications. However, frequent channel estimation and beamforming required to provide a satisfactory quality of service limits mmWave for vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose a novel channel estimation and beam tracking framework for mmWave communications in a vehicular network setting. For channel estimation, we propose an algorithm termed robust adaptive multi-feedback (RAF) that achieves comparable estimation performance as existing channel estimation algorithms, with a si…
Mobility scenarios involving short contact times pose a challenge for high bandwidth data transfer between autonomous vehicles and roadside base stations (BS). Millimeter wave bands are a viable solution as they offer enormous bandwidth in the 60GHz band with several Gbps data transfer rates. However, beamforming is used as a default mode in this band, which requires accurate and continuous alignment under relative motion. We propose a method in which an off-the-shelf IEEE 802.11ad WiFi router is configured to serve as the BS as well as a radar exploiting special structure of 802.11ad preamble…
Millimeter-wave (mmwave) communication represents a potential solution to capacity shortage in vehicular networks. However, effective beam alignment between senders and receivers requires accurate knowledge of the vehicles' position for fast beam steering, which is often impractical to obtain in real time. We address this problem by leveraging the traffic signals regulating vehicular mobility: as an example, we may coordinate beams with red traffic lights, as they correspond to higher vehicle densities and lower speeds. To evaluate our intuition, we propose a tractable, yet accurate, mmwave co…
Enhancing Vehicular Network Performance Through Integrated RSU and UAV Deployment
University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Mardan（曼德工程学院）；GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology（GIK工程科学与技术学院）；University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Peshawar（白沙瓦工程学院）
This paper investigates deep learning techniques to predict transmit beamforming based on only historical channel data without current channel information in the multiuser multiple-input-single-output downlink. This will significantly reduce the channel estimation overhead and improve the spectrum efficiency especially in high-mobility vehicular communications. Specifically, we propose a joint learning framework that incorporates channel prediction and power optimization, and produces prediction for transmit beamforming directly. In addition, we propose to use the attention mechanism in the Lo…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received much attention from the research community due to its potential to achieve high spectral and power efficiency cost-effectively. In addition to traditional cellular networks, the use of IRS in vehicular networks is also considered. Prior works on IRS-aided vehicle-to-everything communications focus on deploying reflection surfaces on the facades of buildings along the road for sidelink performance enhancement. This paper goes beyond the state of the art by presenting a novel paradigm coined Intelligent Reflecting Vehicle Surface (IRVS).…
Channel estimation for hybrid Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems at Millimeter-Waves (mmW)/sub-THz is a fundamental, despite challenging, prerequisite for an efficient design of hybrid MIMO precoding/combining. Most works propose sequential search algorithms, e.g., Compressive Sensing (CS), that are most suited to static channels and consequently cannot apply to highly dynamic scenarios such as Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X). To address the latter ones, we leverage \textit{recurrent vehicle passages} to design a novel Multi Vehicular (MV) hybrid MIMO channel estimation suited for Vehic…
RIS-Enabled Energy-Efficient ISAC for Vehicular Applications
School of Electronics, Peking University（北京大学电子学院）；School of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School（北京大学深圳研究生院电子与计算机工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学工程系）
Currently, autonomous vehicles are able to drive more naturally based on the driving policies learned from millions of driving miles in real environments. However, to further improve the automation level of vehicles is a challenging task, especially in the case of multi-vehicle cooperation. In recent heated discussions of 6G, millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands are deemed to play important roles in new radio communication architectures and algorithms. To enable reliable autonomous driving in 6G, in this paper, we envision collaborative autonomous driving, a new framework that jo…
Mobility may degrade the performance of next-generation vehicular networks operating at the millimeter-wave spectrum: frequent mis-alignment and blockages require repeated beam training and handover, and incur enormous overhead. Nevertheless, mobility induces temporal correlations in the communication beams and in blockage events. In this paper, an adaptive design of beam training, data transmission and handover is proposed, that learns and exploits these temporal correlations to reduce the beam training overhead and optimally trade-off throughput and power consumption. At each time-slot, the …
Autonomous vehicles will rely heavily on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications to obtain a large amount of information required for navigation and road safety purposes. This can be achieved through: (i) leveraging millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies to achieve multi- Gbps data rates, and (ii) exploiting the temporal and spatial correlation of vehicular contents to offload a portion of the traffic from the infrastructure via caching. Characterizing such a system under mmWave directional beamforming, high vehicular mobility, channel fluctuations, and different caching strategies is a compl…
This paper defines the problem of optimizing the downlink multi-user multiple input, single output (MU-MISO) sum-rate for ground users served by an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS) that acts as a relay to the terrestrial base station. The deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is proposed to calculate the optimal active beamforming matrix at the base station and the phase shifts of the reflecting elements at the ARIS to maximize the data rate. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed scheme when compared to deep Q-learning (DQL) and baseline approaches.
Millimeter Waves (mmW) and sub-THz frequencies are the candidate bands for the upcoming Sixth Generation (6G) of communication systems. The use of collimated beams at mmW/sub-THz to compensate for the increased path and penetration loss arises the need for a seamless Beam Management (BM), especially for high mobility scenarios such as the Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) one. Recent research advances in Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) indicate that equipping the network infrastructure, e.g., the Base Station (BS), with either a stand-alone radar or sensing capabilities using optimiz…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) vehicular channels are highly dynamic, and the communication link needs to be reconfigured frequently. In this work, we propose to use a passive radar receiver at the roadside unit to reduce the training overhead of establishing an mmWave communication link. Specifically, the passive radar will tap the transmissions from the automotive radars of the vehicles on the road. The spatial covariance of the received radar signals will be estimated and used to establish the communication link. We propose a simplified radar receiver that does not require the transmitted wavefor…
