Understanding Energy Efficiency and Interference Tolerance in Millimeter Wave Receivers
Panagiotis Skrimponis, Seongjoon Kang, Abbas Khalili, Wonho Lee, Navid Hosseinzadeh, Marco Mezzavilla, Elza Erkip, Mark J. W. Rodwell, James F. Buckwalter, Sundeep Rangan
备注：
Appeared at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers 2021
Power consumption is a key challenge in millimeter wave (mmWave) receiver front-ends, due to the need to support high dimensional antenna arrays at wide bandwidths. Recently, there has been considerable work in developing low-power front-ends, often based on low-resolution ADCs and low-power mixers. A critical but less studied consequence of such designs is the relatively low-dynamic range which in turn exposes the receiver to adjacent carrier interference and blockers. This paper provides a general mathematical framework for analyzing the performance of mmWave front-ends in the presence of out-of-band interference. The goal is to elucidate the fundamental trade-off of power consumption, interference tolerance and in-band performance. The analysis is combined with detailed network simulations in cellular systems with multiple carriers, as well as detailed circuit simulations of key components at 140 GHz. The analysis reveals critical bottlenecks for low-power interference robustness and suggests designs enhancements for use in practical systems.
In observational radio astronomy, sideband-separating receivers are preferred, particularly under high atmospheric noise, which is usually the case in the sub-millimeter range. However, obtaining a good rejection ratio between the two sidebands is difficult since, unavoidably, imbalances in the different analog components appear. We describe a method to correct these imbalances without making any change in the analog part of the sideband-separating receiver, specifically, keeping the intermediate-frequency hybrid in place. This opens the possibility of implementing the method in any existing r…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications and cell densification are the key techniques for the future evolution of cellular systems beyond 5G. Although the current mmWave radio designs are focused on hybrid digital and analog receiver array architectures, the fully digital architecture is an appealing option due to its flexibility and support for multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). In order to achieve reasonable power consumption and hardware cost, the specifications of analog circuits are expected to be compromised, including the resolution of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) an…
Time difference of arrival (TDOA) is a widely used technique for localizing a radio transmitter from the difference in signal arrival times at multiple receivers. For TDOA to work, the individual receivers must estimate the respective signal arrival times precisely, which requires sampling the signal at least double the rate of its highest frequency content, commonly known as the Nyquist rate. Such sampling is less practical for the millimeter wave band comprising of frequencies in 30-300 GHz range. In this paper, we propose an energy detection architecture for accurately estimating the time o…
The paper addresses the problem of determining the unknown position of a mobile station for a mmWave MISO system. This setup is motivated by the fact that massive arrays will be initially implemented only on 5G base stations, likely leaving mobile stations with one antenna. The maximum likelihood solution to this problem is devised based on the time of flight and angle of departure of received downlink signals. While positioning in the uplink would rely on angle of arrival, it presents scalability limitations that are avoided in the downlink. To circumvent the multidimensional optimization of …
Impact of Receiver Antenna Polarization and Resource Scheduler on the Downlink Performance of High Velocity Users in 5G Millimeter Wave Small Cell Technology
Employing low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) for millimeter wave receivers with large antenna arrays provides opportunity to efficiently reduce power consumption of the receiver. Reducing ADC resolution, however, results in performance degradation due to non-negligible quantization error. In addition, the large number of radio frequency (RF) chains is still not desirable. Accordingly, conventional low-resolution ADC systems require more efficient designs to minimize the cost and complexity while maximizing performance. In this article, we discuss advanced low-resolution ADC rec…
Use of low resolution analog to digital converters (ADCs) is an effective way to reduce the high power consumption of millimeter wave (mmWave) receivers. In this paper, a receiver with low resolution ADCs based on adaptive thresholds is considered in downlink mmWave communications in which the channel state information is not known a-priori and acquired through channel estimation. A performance comparison of low-complexity algorithms for power and ADC allocation among transmit and receive terminals, respectively, is provided. Through simulation of practical mmWave cellular networks, it is show…
Receivers with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are promising for high bandwidth millimeter wave (mmWave) systems as they consume less power than their full resolution counterparts. The extreme quantization in one-bit receivers and the use of large antenna arrays at mmWave make channel estimation challenging. In this paper, we develop channel estimation algorithms that exploit the low-rank property of mmWave channels. We also propose a novel training solution that results in a low complexity implementation of our algorithms. Simulation results indicate that the proposed methods achi…
We analyze the diversity gain for a distributed antenna subarray employing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) in millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We show that the diversity gain depends on the number of transmitted data streams, the number of remote antenna units, and the number of propagation paths between RAUs. Furthermore, we show that by using bit-interleaved coded multiple beamforming (BICMB), one can achieve the maximum diversity gain in a distributed antenna subarray system. The assumption in both scenarios is that the numbe…
In the next generations of cellular communication networks, higher density of base stations and higher frequency bands will be adopted. If being reflected by targets, the communication signal also brings information of the targets, in addition to the communication messages, to the receivers. In this paper, it is proposed to leverage the reflected communication signals to reconstruct an image of the environment. Due to the analogy to traditional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and inverse SAR (ISAR), the principles of SAR and ISAR, namely the tomography via Fourier transformation, are adopted wi…
This paper proposes a radio simultaneous location and mapping (radio-SLAM) scheme based on sparse multipath channel estimation. By leveraging sparse channel estimation schemes at millimeter wave bands, namely high resolution estimates of the multipath angle of arrival (AoA), time difference of arrival (TDoA), and angle of departure (AoD), we develop a radio-SLAM algorithm that operates without any requirements of clock synchronization, receiver orientation knowledge, multiple anchor points, or two-way protocols. Thanks to the AoD information obtained via compressed sensing (CS) of the channel,…
Human Body Communication (HBC) provides a low power communication medium for energy constrained wearable/ implantable devices in and around the human body. This paper presents a broadband HBC transceiver implemented in 65nm CMOS that achieves 6.3pJ/b energy efficiency at 30Mbps with -30dB interference-tolerance. Capacitive termination at the receiver end is used to achieve a wideband HBC channel, and Time Domain Signal-Interference Separation (TD-SIS) using Integrating DDR (I-DDR) receiver allows a tolerance of -30 dB Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) with a BER <10-3. The transceiver achieve…
The high path loss associated with millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency communication can be compensated by large scale antenna arrays such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The hybrid beamforming architecture which uses fewer radio frequency chains is implemented to reduce power consumption and hardware complexity, while still supporting multi-stream communication. We propose an efficient expectation-maximization (EM)-based mmWave channel estimator for a lens-based hybrid MIMO system with low resolution sampling at the receiver. The lens-based beamformer is investigated to provi…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm for future cellular networks. Specifically, due to its capability in reshaping the propagation environment, RIS was introduced to address the blockage issue in millimeter Wave (mmWave) or even Terahertz (THz) communications. The deployment of RIS, however, complicates the system architecture and poses a significant challenge for beam training (BT)/ beam alignment (BA), a process that is required to establish a reliable link between the transmitter and the receiver. In this article, we first review several sta…
We propose a new scheme for the robust estimation of the millimeter wave (mmWave) channel. Our approach is based on a sparse formulation of the channel estimation problem coupled with a frame theoretic representation of the sensing dictionary. To clarify, under this approach, the combined effect of transmit precoders and receive beamformers is modeled by a single frame, whose design is optimized to improve the accuracy of the sparse reconstruction problem to which the channel estimation problem is ultimately reduced. The optimized sensing dictionary frame is then decomposed via a Kronecker dec…
5G millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is envisioned to be an integral part of next-generation vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks and autonomous vehicles due to its broad bandwidth, wide field of view sensing, and precise localization capabilities. The reliability of mmWave links may be compromised due to difficulties in beam alignment for mobile channels and due to blocking effects between a mmWave transmitter and a receiver. In this paper, we study the channel characteristics for mmWave and sub-6 GHz V2X communications using ray-tracing simulations. We present results for time-varying path…
There have been recent works on enabling in-band full-duplex operation using millimeter-wave (mmWave) transceivers. These works are based solely on creating sufficient isolation between a transceiver's transmitter and receiver via multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding and combining. In this work, we propose supplementing these beamforming strategies with analog self-interference cancellation (A-SIC). By leveraging A-SIC, a portion of the self-interference is cancelled without the need for beamforming, allowing for more optimal beamforming strategies to be used in serving users. We us…
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…
Low resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) can be employed to improve the energy efficiency (EE) of a wireless receiver since the power consumption of each ADC is exponentially related to its sampling resolution and the hardware complexity. In this paper, we aim to jointly optimize the sampling resolution, i.e., the number of ADC bits, and analog/digital hybrid combiner matrices which provides highly energy efficient solutions for millimeter wave multiple-input multiple output systems. A novel decomposition of the hybrid combiner to three parts is introduced: the analog combiner matrix…
Fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems are likely to operate in the centimeter-wave (3-30 GHz) and millimeter-wave (30-300 GHz) frequency bands, where a vast amount of underutilized bandwidth exists world-wide. To assist in the research and development of these emerging wireless systems, a myriad of measurement studies have been conducted to characterize path loss in urban environments at these frequencies. The standard theoretical free space (FS) and Stanford University Interim (SUI) empirical path loss models were recently modified to fit path loss models obtained from measurements performed…
Exploiting the millimeter wave (mmWave) band has recently attracted considerable attention as a potential solution to widespread deployment of device-to-device (D2D) communication challenges, namely, spectrum scarcity and interference. However, its directional nature makes the utilization of mmWave band a challenging task as it requires careful beam alignment between the D2D transmitter and receiver. In this paper, we investigate the impact of inaccurate angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation as a beam alignment impairment on the performance of a directional mmWave D2D network. We have used tools f…
A fully-digital wideband joint communication-radar (JCR) with a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) architecture at the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band will enable high joint communication and radar performance with enhanced design flexibility. A quantized receiver with few-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) will enable a practical JCR solution with reduced power consumption for futuristic portable devices and autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present a joint communication-radar proof-of-concept platform, named JCR70, to evaluate and demonstrate the performance of these JCR systems u…
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…
Fifth generation (5G) cellular standards are set to utilize millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies, which enable data speeds greater than 10 Gbps and sub-centimeter localization accuracy. These capabilities rely on accurate estimates of the channel parameters, which we define as the angle of arrival, angle of departure, and path distance for each path between the transmitter and receiver. Estimating the channel parameters in a computationally efficient manner poses a challenge because it requires estimation of parameters from a high-dimensional measurement -- particularly for multi-carrier syste…
In this paper, we aim to design highly energy efficient end-to-end communication for millimeter wave multiple-input multiple-output systems. This is done by jointly optimizing the digital-to-analog converter (DAC)/analog-to-digital converter (ADC) bit resolutions and hybrid beamforming matrices. The novel decomposition of the hybrid precoder and the hybrid combiner to three parts is introduced at the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX), respectively, representing the analog precoder/combiner matrix, the DAC/ADC bit resolution matrix and the baseband precoder/combiner matrix. The unknown mat…
The densely packed antennas of millimeter-Wave (mmWave) MIMO systems are often blocked by the rain, snow, dust and even by fingers, which will change the channel's characteristics and degrades the system's performance. In order to solve this problem, we propose a cross-entropy inspired antenna array diagnosis detection (CE-AAD) technique by exploiting the correlations of adjacent antennas, when blockages occur at the transmitter. Then, we extend the proposed CE-AAD algorithm to the case, where blockages occur at transmitter and receiver simultaneously. Our simulation results show that the prop…
Millimeter-wave communications is the most promising technology for next-generation cellular wireless systems, thanks to the large bandwidth available compared to sub-6 GHz networks. Nevertheless, communication at these frequencies requires narrow beams via massive MIMO and beamforming to overcome the strong signal attenuation, and thus precise beam-alignment between transmitter and receiver is needed. The resulting signaling overhead may become a severe impairment, especially in mobile networks with high users density. Therefore, it is imperative to optimize the beam-alignment protocol to min…
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…
In this paper, using the stochastic geometry, we develop a tractable uplink modeling framework for the outage probability of both the single and multi-tier millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks. Each tier's mmWave base stations (BSs) are randomly located and they have particular spatial density, antenna gain, receiver sensitivity, blockage parameter and pathloss exponents. Our model takes account of the maximum power limitation and the per-user power control. More specifically, each user, which could be in line-of-sight (LOS) or non-LOS to its serving mmWave BS, controls its transmit powe…
In this work, we consider both channel estimation and reflection design problems in point-to-point reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO communication systems. First, we show that by exploiting the low-rank nature of mmWave MIMO channels, the received training signals can be written as a low-rank multi-way tensor admitting a canonical polyadic CP decomposition. Utilizing such a structure, a tensor-based RIS channel estimation method (termed TenRICE) is proposed, wherein the tensor factor matrices are estimated using an alternating least squares method. Us…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications have been one of the promising technologies for future wireless networks that integrate a wide range of data-demanding applications. To compensate for the large channel attenuation in mmWave band and avoid high hardware cost, a lens-based beamspace massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is considered. However, the beam squint effect in wideband mmWave systems makes channel estimation very challenging, especially when the receiver is equipped with a limited number of radio-frequency (RF) chains. Furthermore, the real channel data cannot be o…
In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient hybrid precoding design for integrated multicast-unicast millimeter wave (mmWave) system, where the simultaneous wireless information and power transform is considered at receivers. We adopt two sparse radio frequency chain antenna structures at the base station (BS), i.e., fully-connected and subarray structures, and design the codebook-based analog precoding according to the different structures. Then, we formulate a joint digital multicast, unicast precoding and power splitting ratio optimization problem to maximize the energy efficiency of…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication in typical wearable and data center settings is short range. As the distance between the transmitter and the receiver in short range scenarios can be comparable to the length of the antenna arrays, the common far field approximation for the channel may not be applicable. As a result, dictionaries that result in a sparse channel representation in the far field setting may not be appropriate for short distances. In this paper, we develop a novel framework to exploit the structure in short range mmWave channels. The proposed method splits the channel into se…
This paper proposes a three-dimensional (3D) communication channel model for an indoor environment considering the effect of the Hypersurface. The Hypersurface is a software controlled intelligent metasurface, which can be used to manipulate electromagnetic waves, as for example for non-specular reflection and full absorption. Thus it can control the impinging rays from a transmitter towards a receiver location in both LOS and NLOS paths, e.g. to combat distance and improve wireless connectivity. We focus on the 60 GHz mmWave frequency band due to its increasing significance in 5G/6G networks …
