The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the terrestrial cellular networks is envisioned as one key technology for next-generation wireless communications. In this work, we consider the physical layer security of the communications links in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum which are maintained by UAVs functioning as base stations (BS). In particular, we propose a new precoding strategy which incorporates the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper (Eve) compromising link security. We show that our proposed precoder strategy eliminates any need for artificial noise (AN) transmission in underloaded scenarios (fewer users than number of antennas). In addition, we demonstrate that our nonlinear precoding scheme provides promising secrecy-rate performance even for overloaded scenarios at the expense of transmitting low-power AN.
We propose four hybrid combiner/precoder for downlink mmWave massive MU-MIMO systems. The design of a hybrid combiner/precoder is divided in two parts, analog and digital. The system baseband model shows that the signal processed by the mobile station can be interpreted as a received signal in the presence of colored Gaussian noise, therefore, since the digital part of the combiner and precoder do not have constraints for their generation, their designs can be based on any traditional signal processing that takes into account this kind of noise. To the best of our knowledge, this was not consi…
Multicast beamforming is known to improve spectral efficiency. However, its benefits and challenges for hybrid precoders design in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems remain understudied. To this end, this paper investigates the first joint design of hybrid transmit precoders (with an arbitrary number of finite-resolution phase shifts) and receive combiners for mmWave multi-group multicasting. Our proposed design leverages semidefinite relaxation (SDR), alternating optimization and Cholesky matrix factorization to sequentially optimize the digital/analog precoders at the transmitter and the combi…
This paper investigates the joint design of hybrid transmit precoder and analog receive combiners for single-group multicasting in millimeter-wave systems. We propose LB-GDM, a low-complexity learning-based approach that leverages gradient descent with momentum and alternating optimization to design (i) the digital and analog constituents of a hybrid transmitter and (ii) the analog combiners of each receiver. In addition, we also extend our proposed approach to design fully-digital precoders. We show through numerical evaluation that, implementing LB-GDM in either hybrid or digital precoders a…
We consider the problem of ESPRIT-oriented precoder design for beamspace angle-of-departure (AoD) estimation in downlink mmWave multiple-input single-output communications. Standard precoders (i.e., directional/sum beams) yield poor performance in AoD estimation, while Cramer-Rao bound-optimized precoders undermine the so-called shift invariance property (SIP) of ESPRIT. To tackle this issue, the problem of designing ESPRIT-oriented precoders is formulated to jointly optimize over the precoding matrix and the SIP-restoring matrix of ESPRIT. We develop an alternating optimization approach that …
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication has been regarded as one of the most promising technologies for the future generation wireless networks because of its advantages of providing a ultra-wide new spectrum and ultra-high data transmission rate. To reduce the power consumption and circuit cost for mmWave systems, hybrid digital and analog (HDA) architecture is preferred in such a scenario. In this paper, an artificial-noise (AN) aided secure HDA beamforming scheme is proposed for mmWave MISO system with low resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and finite-quantized phase shifters on …
In this letter, we aim to design a robust hybrid precoder and combiner against beam misalignment in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems. We consider the inclusion of the `error statistics' into the precoder and combiner design, where the array response that incorporates the distribution of the misalignment error is first derived. An iterative algorithm is then proposed to design the robust hybrid precoder and combiner to maximize the array gain in the presence of beam misalignment. To further enhance the spectral efficiency, a second-stage digital precoder and combiner are included …
Millimeter wave (mmWave) is a practical solution to provide high data rate for the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. This enables the future autonomous vehicles to exchange big data with the base stations (BSs) such as the velocity and the location to improve the awareness of the advanced driving assistance system (ADAS). In this context, we consider a single-cell multiuser doubly-selective system wherein the BS simultaneously serves multiple vehicles. To accomplish this requirement, the BS is implemented in hybrid architecture to support multiple spatial streams while the vehicles h…
In this paper, we consider the amplify-and-forward relay networks in mmWave systems and propose a hybrid precoder/combiner design approach. The phase-only RF precoding/combining matrices are first designed to support multi-stream transmission, where we compensate the phase for the eigenmodes of the channel. Then, the baseband precoders/combiners are performed to achieve the maximum mutual information. Based on the data processing inequality for the mutual information, we first jointly design the baseband source and relay nodes to maximize the mutual information before the destination baseband …
Jittering effects significantly degrade the performance of UAV millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. To investigate the impacts of UAV jitter on mmWave communications, we firstly model UAV mmWave channel based on the geometric relationship between element antennas of the uniform planar arrays (UPAs). Then, we extract the relationship between (I) UAV attitude angles & position coordinates and (II) angle of arrival (AoA) & angle of departure (AoD) of mmWave channel, and we also derive the distribution of AoA/AoD at UAV side from the random fluctuations of UAV attitude angles, i.e., UAV jitter…
To meet increasing data demands, service providers are considering the use of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for delivering connectivity as aerial base stations (BSs). UAVs are especially important to provide connectivity in case of disasters and accidents which may cripple completely the existing terrestrial networks. However, in order to maintain the communication of UAVs with the core network, it is essential to provide them with wireless backhaul connection to terrestrial BSs. In this work, we use stochastic geometry to study the impact of millimeter-wave (mmWave) backhauling of UAVs in a…
Hybrid beamforming is key to achieving energy-efficient 5G wireless networks equipped with massive amount of antennas. Low-resolution data converters bring yet another degree of freedom to energy efficiency for the state-of-the-art 5G transceivers. In this work, we consider the design of hybrid precoders for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum along with one-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and finite-quantized phase shifters. In particular, we propose an alternating-optimization-based precoder design which recursively computes the…
Supporting reliable and seamless wireless connectivity for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has recently become a critical requirement to enable various different use cases of UAVs. Due to their widespread deployment footprint, cellular networks can support beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) communications for UAVs. In this paper, we consider cellular connected UAVs (C-UAVs) that are served by massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) links to extend coverage range, while also improving physical layer security and authentication. We consider Rician channel and propose a novel linear precod…
This paper investigates adaptive signal shaping methods for millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications based on the maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance (MMED) criterion. In this work, we utilize the indices of analog precoders to carry information and optimize the symbol vector sets used for each analog precoder activation state. Specifically, we firstly propose a joint optimization based signal shaping (JOSS) approach, in which the symbol vector sets used for all analog precoder activation states are jointly optimized by solving a series of quadratical…
This paper proposes a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided and angular-based hybrid beamforming (AB-HBF) technique for the millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed RIS-AB-HBF architecture consists of three stages: (i) RF beamformer, (ii) baseband (BB) precoder/combiner, and (iii) RIS phase shift design. First, in order to reduce the number of RF chains and the channel estimation overhead, RF beamformers are designed based on the 3D geometry-based mmWave channel model using slow time-varying angular parameters of the channel. Second,…
Service providers are considering the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enhance wireless connectivity of cellular networks. To provide connectivity, UAVs have to be backhauled through terrestrial base stations (BSs) to the core network. In particular, we consider millimeter-wave (mmWave) backhauling in the downlink of a hybrid aerial-terrestrial network, where the backhaul links are subject to beamforming misalignment errors. In the proposed model, the user equipment (UE) can connect to either a ground BS or a UAV, where we differentiate between two transmission schemes according to th…
This paper develops a new genetic algorithm based resource allocation (GA-RA) technique for energy-efficient throughout maximization in multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MU-mMIMO) systems using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based transmission. We employ a hybrid precoding (HP) architecture with three stages: (i) radio frequency (RF) beamformer, (ii) baseband (BB) precoder, (iii) resource allocation (RA) block. First, a single RF beamformer block is built for all subcarriers via the slow time-varying angle-of-departure (AoD) information. For enhancing the en…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) hybrid analog-digital beamforming is a promising approach to satisfy the low-latency constraint in multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) systems, which serve as network infrastructure for flexible deployment. However, in highly dynamic multi-UAV environments, analog beam tracking becomes a critical challenge. The overhead of additional pilot transmission at the price of spectral efficiency is shown necessary to achieve high resilience in operation. An efficient method to deal with high dynamics of UAVs applies machine learning, particularly Q-learning, to analog bea…
The cell-free MIMO concept relying on hybrid precoding constitutes an innovative technique capable of dramatically increasing the network capacity of millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems. It dispenses with the cell boundary of conventional multi-cell MIMO systems, while drastically reducing the power consumption by limiting the number of radio frequency (RF) chains at the access points (APs). In this paper, we aim for maximizing the weighted sum rate (WSR) of mmWave cell-free MIMO systems by conceiving a low-complexity hybrid precoding algorithm. We formulate the WSR optimization pro…
GPS-Aided Deep Learning for Beam Prediction and Tracking in UAV mmWave Communication
Department of Intelligent Mechatronics Engineering, and Department of Convergence Engineering for Intelligent Drone, Sejong University（智能机电工程系，智能无人机融合工程系，世宗大学）
A variable-phase-shifter (VPS) architecture with hybrid precoding for mixture use of phase shifters and switches, is proposed for millimeter wave massive multiple-input multiple-output communications. For the VPS architecture, a hybrid precoding design (HPD) scheme, called VPS-HPD, is proposed to optimize the phases according to the channel state information by alternately optimizing the analog precoder and digital precoder. To reduce the computational complexity of the VPS-HPD scheme, a low-complexity HPD scheme for the VPS architecture (VPS-LC-HPD) including alternating optimization in three…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found widespread commercial, civilian, and military applications. Wireless communication has always been one of the core technologies for UAV. However, the communication capacity is becoming a bottleneck for UAV to support more challenging application scenarios. The heavily-occupied sub-6 GHz frequency band is not sufficient to meet the ultra high-data-traffic requirements. The utilization of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands is a promising direction for UAV communications, where large antenna arrays can be packed in a small area on the UAV to pe…
In this paper, we consider the uplink channel estimation phase and downlink data transmission phase of cell-free millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with low-capacity fronthaul links and low-resolution analog-to-digital converters/digital-to-analog converters (ADC/DACs). In cell-free massive MIMO, a control unit dictates the baseband processing at a geographical scale, while the base stations communicate with the control unit through fronthaul links. Unlike most of previous works in cell-free massive MIMO with finite-capacity fronthaul links, we consi…
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is expected to bring transformative improvement to the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. However, due to shared spectrum resources, it is challenging to achieve a critical trade-off between these two integrated functionalities. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new integrated \emph{periodic} sensing and communication mechanism for the UAV-enable ISAC system. Specifically, the user achievable rate is maximized via jointly optimizing UAV trajectory, transmit precoder, and sensing start instant, subject to the sensing frequency and b…
Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）；Technical University of Berlin（柏林工业大学）
We propose a deep learning-based method that uses spatial and temporal information extracted from the sub-6GHz band to predict/track beams in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band. In more detail, we consider a dual-band communication system operating in both the sub-6GHz and mmWave bands. The objective is to maximize the achievable mutual information in the mmWave band with a hybrid analog/digital architecture where analog precoders (RF precoders) are taken from a finite codebook. Finding a RF precoder using conventional search methods incurs large signalling overhead, and the signalling scales w…
This paper discusses the analysis of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based millimeter wave (mmWave) backhaul link, that is offered as a cost-effective and easy deploy the solution to connect a disaster or remote area to the nearest core network. We present the optimal design of a relay system based on fixed-wing UAV, taking into account the actual channel parameters such as the UAV vibrations, tracking error, real 3GPP antenna pattern, UAV's height, flight path, and the effect of physical obstacles. The performance of the considered system is evaluated in terms of outage probability…
Hybrid analog-digital precoding is challenging for broadband millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems, since the analog precoder is frequency-flat but the mmWave channels are frequency-selective. In this paper, we propose a principal component analysis (PCA)-based broadband hybrid precoder/combiner design, where both the fully-connected array and partially-connected subarray (including the fixed and adaptive subarrays) are investigated. Specifically, we first design the hybrid precoder/combiner for fully-connected array and fixed subarray based on PCA, whereby a low-dimensional frequency-…
Physical layer security (PLS) techniques can help to protect wireless networks from eavesdropper attacks. In this paper, we consider the authentication technique that uses fingerprint embedding to defend 5G cellular networks with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems from eavesdroppers and intruders. Since the millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks use narrow and directional beams, PLS can take further advantage of the 3D spatial dimension for improving the authentication of UAV users. Considering a multi-user mmWave cellular network, we propose a power allocation technique that jointly ta…
Industry 4.0 anticipates massive interconnectivity of industrial devices (e.g., sensors, actuators) to support factory automation and production. Due to the rigidity of wired connections to harmonize with automation, wireless information transfer has attracted substantial attention. However, existing solutions for the manufacturing sector face critical issues in coping with the key performance demands: ultra-low latency, high throughput, and high reliability. Besides, recent advancements in wireless millimeter-wave technology advocates hybrid precoding with affordable hardware and outstanding …
Configuring hybrid precoders and combiners is a major challenge to deploy practical mmWave communication systems. Prior work addresses the problem of designing hybrid precoders and combiner, yet focusing on finding solutions under a total transmit power constraint. The design of hybrid precoders and combiners in practical system, is constrained, however, by a per antenna transmit power, since each antenna element in the array is connected to a power amplifier (PA) that has to operate within its linear region. In this paper, we focus on the problem of hybrid precoding and combining with per-ant…
Spatial multiplexing (SMX) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) over the best beamspace was considered as the best solution for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications regarding spectral efficiency (SE), referred as the best beamspace selection (BBS) solution. The equivalent MIMO water-filling (WF-MIMO) channel capacity was treated as an unsurpassed SE upper bound. Recently, researchers have proposed various schemes trying to approach the benchmark and the performance bound. But, are they the real limit of mmWave MIMO systems with reduced radio-frequency (RF) chains? In this paper, we challen…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are the emerging vital components of millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless systems. Accurate beam alignment is essential for efficient beam-based mmWave communications of UAVs with base stations (BSs). Conventional beam sweeping approaches often have large overhead due to the high mobility and autonomous operation of UAVs. Learning-based approaches greatly reduce the overhead by leveraging UAV data, like position to identify optimal beam directions. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for UAV-BS beam alignment using deep Q-Network…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks can provide a resilient communication infrastructure to enhance terrestrial networks in case of traffic spikes or disaster scenarios. However, to be able to do so, they need to be based on high-bandwidth wireless technologies for both radio access and backhaul. With this respect, the millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum represents an enticing solution, since it provides large chunks of untapped spectrum that can enable ultra-high data-rates for aerial platforms. Aerial mmWave channels, however, experience characteristics that are significantly different from…
Power consumption of multi-user (MU) precoding is a major concern in all-digital massive MU multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base-stations with hundreds of antenna elements operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. We propose to replace part of the linear Wiener filter (WF) precoding matrix by a finite-alphabet WF precoding (FAWP) matrix, which enables the use of low-precision hardware that consumes low power and area. To minimize the performance loss of our approach, we present methods that efficiently compute FAWP matrices that best mimic the WF precoder. Our results show that …
Massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) wireless systems operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies enable simultaneous wideband data transmission to a large number of users. In order to reduce the complexity of MU precoding in all-digital basestation architectures, we propose a two-stage precoding architecture that first performs precoding using a sparse matrix in the beamspace domain, followed by an inverse fast Fourier transform that converts the result to the antenna domain. The sparse precoding matrix requires a small number of multipliers and enables regular ha…
This paper investigates the covert communication in an air-to-ground (A2G) system, where a UAV (Alice) can adopt the omnidirectional microwave (OM) or directional mmWave (DM) transmission mode to transmit covert data to a ground user (Bob) while suffering from the detection of an adversary (Willie). For both the OM and DM modes, we first conduct theoretical analysis to reveal the inherent relationship between the transmit rate/transmit power and basic covert performance metrics in terms of detection error probability (DEP), effective covert rate (ECR), and covert Shannon capacity (CSC). To fac…
In this study, we consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted heterogeneous network that is offered as a cost-effective and easy to deploy solution to solve the problem related to transferring traffic of distributed small cells to the core network. For any given distribution of small cell base stations (SBSs), we first characterize an accurate millimeter wave (mmWave) channel model for SBS to networked flying platform (NFP) by taking into consideration real parameters such as UAV's vibrations, distribution of SBSs, position of UAVs in the sky, real three-dimensional (3D) antenna pattern…
Aiming at maximizing the achievable sum-rate of wideband multiuser mmWave massive MIMO systems, the hybrid precoding is studied. Since each computation of the achievable sum-rate can be performed only after the analog precoder and digital precoder are both determined, the maximization of the achievable sum-rate has intractable computational complexity. By introducing the interference free (IF) achievable sum-rate, the design of the analog and digital precoders can be decoupled. To avoid the beam conflict and maximize the IF achievable sum-rate, a Hungarian-based codeword selection algorithm is…
Based on the geometry and ray tracing (RT) theory, a millimeter wave (mmWave) channel model and parameter computation method for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted air-to-ground (A2G) communications are proposed in this paper. In order to speed up the parameter calculation, a reconstruction process of scene database on the original digital map is developed. Moreover, the effects of reconstruction accuracy on the channel parameter and characteristic are analyzed by extensive simulations at 28 GHz under the campus scene. The simulation and analysis results show that the simplified database c…
Cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are recently getting significant attention due to various practical use cases, e.g., surveillance, data gathering, purchase delivery, among other applications. Since UAVs are low power nodes, energy and spectral efficient communication is of paramount importance. To that end, multiple access (MA) schemes can play an important role in achieving high energy efficiency and spectral efficiency. In this work, we introduce rate-splitting MA (RSMA) and non-orthogonal MA (NOMA) schemes in a cellular-connected UAV network. In particular, we investigate…
This paper investigates the hybrid precoding design in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems with a fully-adaptive-connected precoding structure, where a switch-controlled connection is deployed between every antenna and every radio frequency (RF) chain. To maximally enhance the energy efficiency (EE) of hybrid precoding under this structure, the joint optimization of switch-controlled connections and the hybrid precoders is formulated as a large-scale mixed-integer non-convex problem with high-dimensional power constraints. To efficiently solve such a challenging problem, we first decouple it into…
Unmanned aerial vehicles~(UAVs) are envisioned to be an integral part of future 5G communication systems. The agile nature of UAVs for serving users at different locations can help to dynamically optimize coverage and quality-of-service (QoS) in future networks. %However, there is very limited literature available for mmWave communications using UAVs. In this work, we explore the small scale temporal and spatial characteristics of mmWave air-to-ground~(AG) line-of-sight~(LOS) propagation channels at $28$~GHz in different environmental scenarios: dense-urban, suburban, rural, and over sea using…
In this paper, millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless channel characteristics (Doppler spread and path loss modeling) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) assisted communication is analyzed and studied by emulating the real UAV motion using a robotic arm. The motion considers the actual turbulence caused by the wind gusts to the UAV in the atmosphere, which is statistically modeled by the widely used Dryden wind model. The frequency under consideration is 28 GHz in an anechoic chamber setting. A total of 11 distance points from 3.5 feet to 23.5 feet in increments of 2 feet were considered in this ex…
In this work, we explore the potential benefits of deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as aerial base stations (ABSs) with sub-6GHz band and small cells terrestrial base stations (TBSs) with millimeter wave (mmWave) band in a hybrid heterogeneous networks (HetNets). A flexible non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) based user association policy is proposed. By using the tools from stochastic geometry, new analytical expressions for association probability, coverage probability and spectrum efficiency are derived for characterizing the performance of UAV-aided HetNets under the realistic A…
In this paper, an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)-based heterogeneous network is studied to solve the problem of transferring massive traffic of distributed small cells to the core network. First, a detailed three-dimensional (3D) model of the downlink channel is characterized by taking into account the real antenna pattern, UAVs' vibrations, random distribution of small cell base stations (SBSs), and the position of UAVs in 3D space. Then, a rigorous analysis of interference is performed for two types pf interference: intra-cell interference and inter-cell interference. The interference analys…
In this paper, we jointly consider the downlink simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and uplink information transmission in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks, in which the user equipment (UE) locations are modeled using Poisson cluster processes (e.g., Thomas cluster processes or Matérn cluster processes). Distinguishing features of mmWave communications, such as different path loss models for line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) links and directional transmissions are taken into account. In the downlink phase, the assoc…
Recent developments in robotics and communication technologies are paving the way towards the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to provide ubiquitous connectivity in public safety scenarios or in remote areas. The millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum, in particular, has gained momentum since the huge amount of free spectrum available at such frequencies can yield very high data rates. In the UAV context, however, mmWave operations may incur severe signal attenuation and sensitivity to blockage, especially considering the very long transmission distances involved. In this paper, we present a …
