Optical phased arrays are of strong interest for beam steering in telecom and LIDAR applications. A phased array ideally requires that the field produced by each element in the array (a pixel) is fully controllable in phase and amplitude (ideally constant). This is needed to realize a phase gradient along a direction in the array, and thus beam steering in that direction. In practice, grating lobes appear if the pixel size is not sub-wavelength, which is an issue for many optical technologies. Furthermore, the phase performance of an optical pixel may not span the required $2π$ phase range, or may not produce a constant amplitude over its phase range. These limitations result in imperfections in the phase gradient, which in turn introduce undesirable secondary lobes. We discuss the effects of non-ideal pixels on beam formation, in a general and technology-agnostic manner. By examining the strength of secondary lobes with respect to the main lobe, we quantify beam steering quality, and make recommendations on the pixel performance required for beam steering within prescribed specifications. By applying appropriate compensation strategies, we show that it is possible to realize high-quality beam steering even when the pixel performance is non-ideal, with intensity of the secondary lobes be two orders of magnitude smaller than the main lobe.
We present measurements of the 28 GHz self-interference channel for full-duplex sectorized multi-panel millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, such as integrated access and backhaul. We measure the isolation between the input of a transmitting phased array panel and the output of a co-located receiving phased array panel, each of which is electronically steered across a number of directions in azimuth and elevation. In total, nearly 6.5 million measurements were taken in an anechoic chamber to densely inspect the directional nature of the coupling between 256-element phased arrays. We observe that h…
Beamforming makes possible a focused communication method. It is extensively employed in many disciplines involving electromagnetic waves, including arrayed ultrasonic, optical, and high-speed wireless communication. Conventional beam steering often requires the addition of separate active amplitude phase control units after each radiating element. The high power consumption and complexity of large-scale phased arrays can be overcome by reducing the number of active controllers, pushing beamforming into satellite communications and deep space exploration. Here, we suggest a brand-new design fo…
Millimeter-wave communication has the potential to deliver orders of magnitude increases in mobile data rates. A key design challenge is to enable rapid beam alignment with phased arrays. Traditional millimeter-wave systems require a high beam alignment overhead, typically an exhaustive beam sweep, to find the beam direction with the highest beamforming gain. Compressive sensing is a promising framework to accelerate beam alignment. However, model mismatch from practical array hardware impairments poses a challenge to its implementation. In this work, we introduce a neural network assisted com…
Modern radar systems are expected to operate reliably in congested environments. A candidate technology for meeting these demands is frequency agile radar (FAR), which randomly changes its carrier frequencies. FAR is known to improve the electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM) performance while facilitating operation in congested setups. To enhance the target recovery performance of FAR in complex electromagnetic environments, we propose two radar schemes extending FAR to multi-carrier waveforms. The first is Wideband Multi-carrier Agile Radar (WMAR), which transmits/receives wideband wavefo…
The emergence of visible light communication (VLC) technology as a solution to solve radio frequency impediments, such as spectrum shortage, is continuously appealing. In addition to its large and unlicensed bandwidth, VLC provides a high level of security in a closed room with zero radio frequency interference. However, loss of the VLC signal is experienced when the receiver rotates or moves. This challenge requires a special solution for integration into portable devices. On the other hand, re-configurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a technology exploited in radio frequency to solve dead z…
Visible light communication (VLC) is an emerging technology that enables broadband data rates using the visible spectrum. In this paper, considering slow beam steering where VLC beam directions are assumed to be fixed during a transmission frame, we find the steering angles that simultaneously serve multiple users within the frame duration and maximize the data rates. This is achieved by solving a non-convex optimization problem using a grid-based search and majorization-minimization (MM) procedure. Subsequently, we consider multiple steerable beams with a larger number of users in the network…
Millimeter-wave communications rely on beamforming gain from both transmitters and receivers to compensate for severe propagation loss. To achieve adequate gain, beam training is required to identify propagation directions. The main challenge in beam training arises from maintaining low overhead with increased array size. This paper presents a novel one-shot beam training technique that utilizes the emerging architecture of true-time-delay (TTD) arrays. We first show that TTD arrays facilitate frequency dependent beam steering. The proposed training procedure with TTD arrays then exploits this…
The millimeter-wave (mmW) communications is a key enabling technology in 5G to provide ultra-high throughput. Current mmW technologies rely on analog phased arrays to realize beamforming gain and overcome high path loss. However, due to a limited number of simultaneous beams that can be created with analog/hybrid phased antenna arrays, the overheads of beam training and beam scheduling become a bottleneck for emerging networks that need to support a large number of users and low latency applications. This paper introduces rainbow-link, a novel multiple access protocol, that can achieve low lat…
Microwave phased array antennas (PAAs) are very attractive to defense applications and high-speed wireless communications for their abilities of fast beam scanning and complex beam pattern control. However, traditional PAAs based on phase shifters suffer from the beam-squint problem and have limited bandwidths. True-time-delay (TTD) beamforming based on low-loss photonic delay lines can solve this problem. But it is still quite challenging to build large-scale photonic TTD beamformers due to their high hardware complexity. In this paper, we demonstrate a photonic TTD beamforming network based …
In this paper, we present a novel real-time multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channel sounder for the 28 GHz band. Until now, most investigations of the directional characteristics of millimeter-wave channels have used mechanically rotating horn antennas. In contrast, the sounder presented here is capable of performing horizontal and vertical beam steering with the help of phased arrays. Due to its fast beam-switching capability, the proposed sounder can perform measurements that are directionally resolved both at the transmitter(TX) and receiver (RX) in 1.44 milliseconds compared to the m…
