Multibeam technology enables the use of two or more subbeams for joint communication and radio sensing, to meet different requirements of beamwidth and pointing directions. Generating and optimizing multibeam subject to the requirements is critical and challenging, particularly for systems using analog arrays. This paper develops optimal solutions to a range of multibeam design problems, where both communication and sensing are considered. We first study the optimal combination of two pre-generated subbeams, and their beamforming vectors, using a combining phase coefficient. Closed-form optimal solutions are derived to the constrained optimization problems, where the received signal powers for communication and the beamforming waveforms are alternatively used as the objective and constraint functions. We also develop global optimization methods which directly find optimal solutions for a single beamforming vector. By converting the original intractable complex NP-hard global optimization problems to real quadratically constrained quadratic programs, near-optimal solutions are obtained using semidefinite relaxation techniques. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed constrained multibeam generation and optimization methods.
Beamforming has great potential for joint communication and sensing (JCAS), which is becoming a demanding feature on many emerging platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles and smart cars. Although beamforming has been extensively studied for communication and radar sensing respectively, its application in the joint system is not straightforward due to different beamforming requirements by communication and sensing. In this paper, we propose a novel multibeam framework using steerable analog antenna arrays, which allows seamless integration of communication and sensing. Different to conventio…
This paper studies the precoder design problem of achieving max-min fairness (MMF) amongst users in multigateway multibeam satellite communication systems with feeder link interference. We propose a beamforming strategy based on a newly introduced transmission scheme known as rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA). RSMA relies on multi-antenna rate-splitting at the transmitter and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receivers, such that the intended message for a user is split into a common part and a private part and the interference is partially decoded and partially treated as …
Multibeam analog arrays have been proposed for millimeter-wave joint communication and sensing (JCAS). We study multibeam planar arrays for JCAS, providing time division duplex communication and full-duplex sensing with steerable beams. In order to have a large aperture with a narrow beamwidth in the radiation pattern, we propose to design a sparse tiled planar array (STPA) aperture with affordable number of phase shifters. The modular tiling and sparse design of the array are non-convex optimization problems, however, we exploit the fact that the more irregularity of the antenna array geometr…
This paper proposes a robust beamforming (BF) scheme to enhance physical layer security (PLS) of the downlink of a multibeam satellite system in the presence of either uncoordinated or coordinated eavesdroppers (Eves). Specifically, with knowing only the approximate locations of the Eves, we aim at maximizing the worst-case achievable secrecy rate (ASR) of the legitimate user (LU), subject to the constraints of per-antenna transmit power and quality of service (QoS) requirement of the LU. Since the optimization problem is non-convex, we first adopt the discretization method to deal with the un…
In this paper, by adopting the superposition of terms with unequal coefficients, some useful closed-form formulas for the class of large planar arrays are presented for predicting the directivities of radiated beams. Despite the applied simplifying assumptions, the provided formulas may be used for designing a large multiple-beam planar array with a specified power pattern. Several illustrative examples are presented which are numerically demonstrate by the MATLAB software. The applicability of the proposed synthesis method verified by the achieved conformity between the simulations and theore…
This work focuses on the promising Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) and its beamforming design problem to achieve max-min fairness (MMF) among multiple co-channel multicast groups with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). Contrary to the conventional linear precoding (NoRS) that relies on fully treating any residual interference as noise, we consider a novel multigroup multicast beamforming strategy based on RSMA. RSMA relies on linearly precoded Rate-Splitting (RS) at the transmitter and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) at the receivers, and has recent…
Precoding for multibeam satellite systems with full frequency reuse in a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) downlink scenario is addressed. A testbed is developed to perform an over-the-air field trial of zero forcing precoding for the spatial multiplexing of two separate video streams over two co-located geostationary satellites. Commercial-off-the-shelf DVB-S2x receivers in two single-antenna user terminals (UTs) are operated to successfully decode two independent video streams. To this end, particular attention is paid to a comprehensive assessment of the practical synchron…
Joint communications and sensing (JCAS) is potentially a hallmark technology for the sixth generation mobile network (6G). Most existing JCAS designs are based on digital arrays, analog arrays with tunable phase shifters, or hybrid arrays, which are effective but are generally complicated to design and power inefficient. This article introduces the energy-efficient and easy-to-design multi-beam antenna arrays (MBAAs) for JCAS. Using pre-designed and fixed analog devices, such as lens or Butler matrix, MBAA can simultaneously steer multiple beams yet with negligible power consumption compared w…
Signal Processing Foundations of Reconfigurable Antennas in the Tri-Hybrid MIMO Architecture
University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；San Diego State University（圣地亚哥州立大学）；Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校明H. Kao电气与计算机工程系）
School of Information and Communications Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学信息与通信工程学院）；School of Computer Science & Technology, Xi’an University of Posts & Telecommunications（西安邮电大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Terahertz Beam Squint Mitigation via Six-Dimensional Movable Antennas
National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Glasgow College, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学格拉斯哥学院）
Tri-Hybrid Multi-User Precoding Using Pattern-Reconfigurable Antennas: Fundamental Models and Practical Algorithms
School of Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Kelowna（不列颠哥伦比亚大学工程学院）；Electrical and Computer Engineering Program, Division of Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学计算机、电气和数学科学与工程学部电气与计算机工程项目）
Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) provide a new paradigm to realize large-scale antenna arrays for future wireless systems. In this paper, we study the downlink millimeter wave (mmWave) DMA systems with limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains. By using a specific DMA structure, an equivalent mmWave channel model is first explicitly characterized. Based on that, we propose an effective joint microstrip selection and beamforming scheme to accommodate for the limited number of RF chains. A low-complexity digital beamforming solution with channel gain-based microstrip selection is develope…
Recently, compressive antenna arrays have been considered for DoA estimation with reduced hardware complexity. By utilizing compressive sensing, such arrays employ a linear combining network to combine signals from a larger set of antenna elements in the analog RF domain. In this paper, we develop a design approach based on the minimization of error between spatial correlation function (SCF) of the compressive and the uncompressed array resulting in the estimation performance of the two arrays to be as close as possible. The proposed design is based on grid-free stochastic gradient descent (SG…
A hybrid analog-digital combiner for broadcast vehicular communication is proposed. It has an analog part that does not require any channel state information or feedback from the receiver, and a digital part that uses maximal ratio combining (MRC). We focus on designing the analog part of the combiner to optimize the received signal strength along all azimuth angles for robust periodic vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, in a scenario of one dominant component between the communicating vehicles (e.g., highway scenario). We show that the parameters of a previously suggested fully analog com…
Exploiting Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems (SWANs) for Uplink Tri-Hybrid Beamforming
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽女王学院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Friedrich Alexander-University Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU)（弗里德里希·亚历山大·埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）
Hybrid Beamforming for Subarray-Level Movable Antenna Enhanced MU-MIMO Communications
Zhejiang Gongshang University（浙江工商大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；National Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications（无线通信全国重点实验室）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学）
In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient radar beampattern design framework for a Millimeter Wave (mmWave) massive multi-input multi-output (mMIMO) system, equipped with a hybrid analog-digital (HAD) beamforming structure. Aiming to reduce the power consumption and hardware cost of the mMIMO system, we employ a machine learning approach to synthesize the probing beampattern based on a small number of RF chains and antennas. By leveraging a combination of softmax neural networks, the proposed solution is able to achieve a desirable beampattern with high accuracy.
In time-division duplexing (TDD) systems, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relies on the channel reciprocity to obtain the downlink (DL) channel state information (CSI) with the uplink (UL) CSI. In practice, the mismatches in the radio frequency (RF) analog circuits among different antennas at the base station (BS) break the end-to-end UL and DL channel reciprocity. Antenna calibration is necessary to avoid the severe performance degradation with massive MIMO. Many calibration schemes are available to compensate the RF gain mismatches and restore the channel reciprocity in TDD mas…
Large-scale multiple-antenna systems have been identified as a promising technology for the next generation of wireless systems. However, by scaling up the number of receive antennas the energy consumption will also increase. One possible solution is to use low-resolution analog-to-digital converters at the receiver. This paper considers large-scale multiple-antenna uplink systems with 1-bit analog-to-digital converters on each receive antenna. Since oversampling can partially compensate for the information loss caused by the coarse quantization, the received signals are firstly oversampled by…
Conventional hybrid analog-digital architectures for millimeter-wave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems suffer from poor scalability and high implementational costs. The former is caused by the high power loss in the analog network, and the latter is due to the fact that classic MIMO transmission techniques require power amplifiers with high back-offs. This paper proposes a novel hybrid analog-digital architecture which addresses both of these challenges. This architecture implements the analog front-end via a passive reflect- or transmit-array to resolve the scalability iss…
This paper presents a self-contained factorization for the Vandermonde matrices associated with true-time delay based wideband analog multi-beam beamforming using antenna arrays. The proposed factorization contains sparse and orthogonal matrices. Novel self-recursive radix-2 algorithms for Vandermonde matrices associated with true time delay based delay-sum filterbanks are presented to reduce the circuit complexity of multi-beam analog beamforming systems. The proposed algorithms for Vandermonde matrices by a vector attain $\mathcal{O}(N \log N)$ delay-amplifier circuit counts. Error bounds fo…
In this paper, we propose a new hybrid analog and digital combining architecture for millimeter wave (mmWave) multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. The proposed structure employs antenna subset selection per radio frequency (RF) chain based on active/inactive switches and uses constant phase shifters (CPS) to control the phases of signals in the RF circuit. In this scheme, for each RF chain, a subset of receive antennas that contribute more to the desired signal power than the interference power is chosen for signal combining in the analog domain, whereas other receive a…
Although the hardware complexity of the analog self-interference canceller in full duplex Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) designs does not necessarily scale with the number of transceiver antennas, exploiting the benefits of analog cancellation in massive MIMO systems with hundreds of antenna elements is still quite impractical. Hybrid Analog and Digital (A/D) beamforming architectures have been lately considered as a candidate technology for realizing massive MIMO transceivers with very large number of antenna elements, but with much fewer numbers of Radio Frequency (RF) chains. In this…
In fifth-generation (5G) communication, the RF lens antenna is introduced with advantages of high antenna gain and low hardware cost in analog/digital hybrid beamforming technology. In this paper, we design and manufacture the appropriate RF lens antenna for mmWave communication identified in simulation analysis and present a real-time mmWave lens MIMO testbed. Furthermore, in conventional phase-shift MIMO, beam-squint, a problem caused by the wideband of mmWave communication, is estimated with the fabricated RF lens antenna.
We consider wireless communication systems with compact planar arrays having densely spaced antenna elements in conjunction with one-bit analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters (ADCs/DACs). We provide closed-form expressions for the achievable rates with simple linear processing techniques for the uplink as well as the downlink scenarios while taking into account the effects of antenna mutual coupling. In the downlink case, we introduce the concept of non-radiating dithering to combat correlations of the quantization errors. Under higher antenna element density, we show that the per…
A variety of hybrid analog-digital beamforming architectures have recently been proposed for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to reduce energy consumption and the cost of implementation. In the analog processing network of these architectures, the practical sub-connected structure requires lower power consumption and hardware complexity than the fully connected structure but cannot fully exploit the beamforming gains, which leads to a loss in overall performance. In this work, we propose a novel unequal sub-connected architecture for hybrid combining at the receiver of a m…
An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system with transmit antenna selection (TAS) using orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) scheme is proposed in this paper. This system combines TAS and IRS with hybrid analog-digital beamforming (HBF) for 60 GHz mmWave communications in order to exploit the benefits of TAS, OSTBC, analog beamforming (ABF), and transmit digital precoding techniques. The proposed system, however, benefits from the transmit diversity gain of OSTBC scheme as well as from the signal-to-noise r…
