Communication in Millimeter wave (mmWave) band relies on narrow beams due to directionality, high path loss, and shadowing. One can use beam alignment (BA) techniques to find and adjust the direction of these narrow beams. In this paper, BA at the base station (BS) is considered, where the BS sends a set of BA packets to scan different angular regions while the user listens to the channel and sends feedback to the BS for each received packet. It is assumed that the packets and feedback received at the user and BS, respectively, can be correctly decoded. Motivated by practical constraints such as propagation delay, a feedback delay for each BA packet is considered. At the end of the BA, the BS allocates a narrow beam to the user including its angle of departure for data transmission and the objective is to maximize the resulting expected beamforming gain. A general framework for studying this problem is proposed based on which a lower bound on the optimal performance as well as an optimality achieving scheme are obtained. Simulation results reveal significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art BA methods in the presence of feedback delay.
Millimeter-wave will be a key technology in next-generation wireless networks thanks to abundant bandwidth availability. However, the use of large antenna arrays with beamforming demands precise beam-alignment between transmitter and receiver, and may entail huge overhead in mobile environments. This paper investigates the design of an optimal interactive beam-alignment and data communication protocol, with the goal of minimizing power consumption under a minimum rate constraint. The base-station selects beam-alignment or data communication and the beam parameters, based on feedback from the u…
Narrow beams are key to wireless communications in millimeter wave frequency bands. Beam alignment (BA) allows the base station (BS) to adjust the direction and width of the beam used for communication. During BA, the BS transmits a number of scanning beams covering different angular regions. The goal is to minimize the expected width of the uncertainty region (UR) that includes the angle of departure of the user. Conventionally, in interactive BA, it is assumed that the feedback corresponding to each scanning packet is received prior to transmission of the next one. However, in practice, the …
Delay alignment modulation (DAM) is a novel wideband communication technique, which exploits the high spatial resolution and multi-path sparsity of millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to mitigate inter-symbol interference (ISI), without relying on conventional techniques like channel equalization or multi-carrier transmission. In this paper, we extend the DAM technique to multi-user mmWave massive MIMO communication systems. We first provide asymptotic analysis by showing that when the number of base station (BS) antennas is much larger than the total…
Delay alignment modulation (DAM) has been recently proposed to enable manipulable channel delay spread for efficient single- or multi-carrier communications. In particular, with perfect delay alignment, inter-symbol interference (ISI) can be eliminated even with single-carrier (SC) transmission, without relying on sophisticated channel equalization. The key ideas of DAM are delay pre-compensation and path-based beamforming, so that all multi-path signal components may arrive at the receiver simultaneously and be superimposed constructively, rather than causing the detrimental ISI. Compared to …
This paper proposes a novel broadband transmission technology, termed delay alignment modulation (DAM), which enables the low-complexity equalization-free single-carrier communication, yet without suffering from inter-symbol interference (ISI). The key idea of DAM is to deliberately introduce appropriate delays for information-bearing symbols at the transmitter side, so that after propagating over the time-dispersive channel, all multi-path signal components will arrive at the receiver simultaneously and constructively. We first show that by applying DAM for the basic multiple-input single-out…
Communication in high frequencies such as millimeter wave and terahertz suffer from high path-loss and intense shadowing which necessitates beamforming for reliable data transmission. On the other hand, at high frequencies the channels are sparse and consist of few spatial clusters. Therefore, beam alignment (BA) strategies are used to find the direction of these channel clusters and adjust the width of the beam used for data transmission. In this work, a single-user uplink scenario where the channel has one dominant cluster is considered. It is assumed that the user transmits a set of BA pack…
We study the problem of communication over an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel with an AWGN feedback channel. When the feedback channel is noiseless, the classic Schalkwijk-Kailath (S-K) scheme is known to achieve capacity in a simple sequential fashion, while attaining reliability superior to non-feedback schemes. In this work, we show how simplicity and reliability can be attained even when the feedback is noisy, provided that the feedback channel is sufficiently better than the feedforward channel. Specifically, we introduce a low-complexity low-delay interactive scheme that ope…
In this paper, the $K$-user interference channel with secrecy constraints is considered with delayed channel state information at transmitters (CSIT). We propose a novel secure retrospective interference alignment scheme in which the transmitters carefully mix information symbols with artificial noises to ensure confidentiality. Achieving positive secure degrees of freedom (SDoF) is challenging due to the delayed nature of CSIT, and the distributed nature of the transmitters. Our scheme works over two phases: phase one in which each transmitter sends information symbols mixed with artificial n…
