Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are expected to play an important role in future wireless communication systems. These surfaces typically rely on their reflection beamforming codebooks to reflect and focus the signal on the target receivers. Prior work has mainly considered pre-defined RIS beamsteering codebooks that do not adapt to the environment and hardware and lead to large beam training overhead. In this work, a novel deep reinforcement learning based framework is developed to efficiently construct the RIS reflection beam codebook. This framework adopts a multi-level design approach that transfers the learning between the multiple RIS subarrays, which speeds up the learning convergence and highly reduces the computational complexity for large RIS surfaces. The proposed approach is generic for co-located/distributed RIS surfaces with arbitrary array geometries and with stationary/non-stationary channels. Further, the developed solution does not require explicitly channel knowledge and adapts the codebook beams to the surrounding environment, user distribution, and hardware characteristics. Simulation results show that the proposed learning framework can learn optimized interaction codebooks within reasonable iterations. Besides, with only 6 beams, the learned codebook outperforms a 256-beam DFT codebook, which significantly reduces the beam training overhead.
In this study, we analyze the codebook design used for analog beamforming. Analog beamforming and combining suffer from a subspace sampling limitation, that is, the receiver cannot directly observe the channel coefficients; instead, the receiver observes a noisy version of their weighted combination. To resolve this, the transmitter and the receiver usually collaborate to determine the best beamformer combiner pair during the beam-sweeping process. This is done by evaluating a limited number of codewords chosen from a pre-defined codebook. In this study, we propose a new framework inspired by …
Scaling the number of antennas up is a key characteristic of current and future wireless communication systems. The hardware cost and power consumption, however, motivate large-scale MIMO systems, especially at millimeter wave (mmWave) bands, to rely on analog-only or hybrid analog/digital transceiver architectures. With these architectures, mmWave base stations normally use pre-defined beamforming codebooks for both initial access and data transmissions. Current beam codebooks, however, generally adopt single-lobe narrow beams and scan the entire angular space. This leads to high beam trainin…
In pursuance of the unused spectrum in higher frequencies, millimeter wave (mmWave) bands have a pivotal role. However, the high path-loss and poor scattering associated with mmWave communications highlight the necessity of employing effective beamforming techniques. In order to efficiently search for the beam to serve a user and to jointly serve multiple users it is often required to use a composite beam which consists of multiple disjoint lobes. A composite beam covers multiple desired angular coverage intervals (ACIs) and ideally has maximum and uniform gain (smoothness) within each desired…
Hand blockage leads to significant performance impairments at millimeter wave carrier frequencies. A number of prior works have characterized the loss in signal strength with the hand using studies with horn antennas and form-factor user equipments (UEs). However, the impact of the hand on the effective phase response seen by the antenna elements has not been studied so far. Towards this goal, we consider a measurement framework that uses a hand phantom holding the UE in relaxed positions reflective of talk mode, watching videos, and playing games. We first study the impact of blockage on a di…
This paper focuses on the design of beamforming codebooks that maximize the average normalized beamforming gain for any underlying channel distribution. While the existing techniques use statistical channel models, we utilize a model-free data-driven approach with foundations in machine learning to generate beamforming codebooks that adapt to the surrounding propagation conditions. The key technical contribution lies in reducing the codebook design problem to an unsupervised clustering problem on a Grassmann manifold where the cluster centroids form the finite-sized beamforming codebook for th…
In this paper, we design, prototype, and experiment a closed-loop radiative wireless power transfer (WPT) system with adaptive waveform and beamforming using limited feedback. Spatial and frequency domains are exploited by jointly utilizing multi-sine waveform and multi-antenna beamforming at the transmitter in WPT system to adapt to the multipath fading channel and boost the output dc power. A closed-loop architecture based on a codebook design and a low complexity over-the-air limited feedback using an IEEE 802.15.4 RF interface is proposed. The codebook consists of multiple codewords where …
Beamforming structures with fixed beam codebooks provide economical solutions for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications due to the low hardware cost. However, the training overhead to search for the optimal beamforming configuration is proportional to the codebook size. To improve the efficiency of beam tracking, we propose a beam tracking scheme based on the channel fingerprint database, which comprises mappings between statistical beamforming gains and user locations. The scheme tracks user movement by utilizing the trained beam configurations and estimating the gains of beam configuration…
We consider reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided sixth-generation (6G) terahertz (THz) communications for indoor environment in which a base station (BS) wishes to send independent messages to its serving users with the help of multiple RISs. For indoor environment, various obstacles such as pillars, walls, and other objects can result in no line-of-sight signal path between the BS and a user, which can significantly degrade performance. To overcome such limitation of indoor THz communication, we firstly optimize the placement of RISs to maximize the coverage area. Under the optimize…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) and massive MIMO systems are intrinsic components of 5G and beyond. These systems rely on using beamforming codebooks for both initial access and data transmission. Current beam codebooks, however, generally consist of a large number of narrow beams that scan all possible directions, even if these directions are never used. This leads to very large training overhead. Further, these codebooks do not normally account for the hardware impairments or the possible non-uniform array geometries, and their calibration is an expensive process. To overcome these limitations, thi…
Most of the prior works on designing codebooks for limited feedback systems have not considered the presence of strong line-of-sight (LOS) channel component. This paper proposes the design of polar-cap codebook (PCC) for multipleinput single-output (MISO) limited feedback systems subject to Rician fading channels. The codewords of the designed PCC are adaptively constructed according to the instantaneous strength of the LOS channel component. Simulation results show that the codebook can significantly enhance the performance of transmit beamforming in terms of received signal-to-noise ratio (S…
Communications system with analog or hybrid analog/digital architectures usually relies on a pre-defined codebook to perform beamforming. With the increase in the size of the antenna array, the characteristics of the spherical wavefront in the near-field situation are not negligible. Therefore, it is necessary to design a codebook that is adaptive to near-field scenarios. In this letter, we investigate the hierarchical codebook design method in the near-field situation. We develop a steering beam gain calculation method and design the lower-layer codebook to satisfy the coverage of the Fresnel…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can improve the capacity of the wireless communication system by providing the extra link between the base station (BS) and the user. In order to resist the "multiplicative fading" effect, RIS is more likely to develop into extremely large-scale RIS (XL-RIS) for future 6G communications. Beam training is an effective way to acquire channel state information (CSI) for the XL-RIS assisted system. Existing beam training schemes rely on the far-field codebook, which is designed based on the far-field channel model. However, due to the large aperture of XL-R…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Nokia Bell Laboratories（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；Texas A&M University at Qatar（德克萨斯农工大学卡塔尔分校）
To establish reliable and long-range millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication, beamforming is deemed to be a promising solution. Although beamforming can be done in the digital and analog domains, both approaches are hindered by several constraints when it comes to mmWave communications. For example, performing fully digital beamforming in mmWave systems involves using many radio frequency (RF) chains, which are expensive and consume high power. This necessitates finding more efficient ways for using fewer RF chains while taking advantage of the large antenna arrays. One way to overcome this cha…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a revolutionary technology to cost-effectively improve the performance of wireless networks. We first review the existing framework of channel estimation and passive beamforming (CE & PBF) in RIS-assisted communication systems. To reduce the excessive pilot signaling overhead and implementation complexity of the CE & PBF framework, we conceive a codebook-based framework to strike flexible tradeoffs between communication performance and signaling overhead. Moreover, we provide useful insights into the codebook design and learning mechanisms of the RI…
Extremely large-scale massive multiple-input-multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is regarded as a promising technology for next-generation communication systems. In order to enhance the beamforming gains, codebook-based beam training is widely adopted in XL-MIMO systems. However, in XL-MIMO systems, the near-field domain expands, and near-field codebook should be adopted for beam training, which significantly increases the pilot overhead. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning-based beam training scheme where the near-field channel model and the near-field codebook are considered. To be spec…
Employing large antenna arrays is a key characteristic of millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz communication systems. Due to the hardware constraints and the lack of channel knowledge, codebook based beamforming/combining is normally adopted to achieve the desired array gain. However, most of the existing codebooks focus only on improving the gain of their target user, without taking interference into account. This can incur critical performance degradation in dense networks. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient online reinforcement learning based beam pattern design algorithm that l…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a revolutionary technology for sixth-generation (6G) networks owing to its ability to manipulate wireless environments. As a frequency-selective device, RIS can only effectively shape the propagation of signals within a certain frequency band. Due to this frequency-selective property, the deployment of RIS in cellular networks will introduce a complicated base station (BS)-RIS-user association issue since adjacent BSs operate at different frequency bands. In this paper, with the consideration of the frequency-selective characteristics of RIS, we aim …
