As a promising technology in beyond-5G (B5G) and 6G, dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) aims to ensure both radar sensing and communication on a single integrated platform with unified signaling schemes. To achieve accurate sensing and reliable communication, large-scale arrays are anticipated to be implemented in such systems, which brings out the prominent issues on hardware cost and power consumption. To address these issues, hybrid beamforming (HBF), beyond its successful deployment in communication-only systems, could be a promising approach in the emerging DFRC ones. In this article, we investigate the development of the HBF techniques on the DFRC system in a self-contained manner. Specifically, we first introduce the basics of the HBF based DFRC system, where the system model and different receive modes are discussed with focus. Then we illustrate the corresponding design principles, which span from the performance metrics and optimization formulations to the design approaches and our preliminary results. Finally, potential extension and key research opportunities, such as the combination with the reconfigurable intelligent surface, are discussed concisely.
Hybrid analog and digital beamforming has emerged as a key enabling technology for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems since it can balance the trade-off between system performance and hardware efficiency. Owing to the strong ability of central control, cooperative networks show great potential to enhance the spectral efficiency of mmWave communications. In this paper, we consider cooperative mmWave MIMO systems and propose user association and hybrid beamforming design algorithms for three typical hybrid beamforming architectures. The c…
In this paper, we present a 2D target localization method using two low cost and compact Mellimeter Wave Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (MMW-FMCW) radars. To create a 2D map we exploit the bilateration method followed by a multi-target tracking block to remove the ghost targets. Finally, we present experimental results based on the data gathered from two FMCW radars operating at $\rm 79 \;GHz$.
Analog beamforming is the predominant approach for millimeter wave (mmWave) communication given its favorable characteristics for limited-resource devices. In this work, we aim at reducing the spectral efficiency gap between analog and digital beamforming methods. We propose a method for refined beam selection based on the estimated raw channel. The channel estimation, an underdetermined problem, is solved using compressed sensing (CS) methods leveraging angular domain sparsity of the channel. To reduce the complexity of CS methods, we propose dictionary learning iterative soft-thresholding al…
The wide bandwidths available at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies have offered exciting potential to wireless communication systems and radar alike. Communication systems can offer higher rates and support more users with mmWave bands while radar systems can benefit from higher resolution captures. This leads to the possibility that portions of mmWave spectrum will be occupied by both communication and radar (e.g., 60 GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band). This potential coexistence motivates the work of this paper, in which we present a design that can enable simultaneous, i…
Hybrid analog and digital beamforming (HBF) has been recognized as an attractive technique offering a tradeoff between hardware implementation limitation and system performance for future broadband millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. In contrast to most current works focusing on the HBF design for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based mmWave systems, this paper investigates the HBF design for single carrier (SC) systems due to the advantage of low peak-to-average power ratio in transmissions. By applying the alternating minimization method, we propose an efficient HBF scheme ba…
Beamforming is one of the key techniques in millimeter wave (mmWave) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communications. Designing appropriate beamforming not only improves the quality and strength of the received signal, but also can help reduce the interference, consequently enhancing the data rate. In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-agent double deep Q-learning algorithm for beamforming in mmWave MIMO networks, where multiple base stations (BSs) can automatically and dynamically adjust their beams to serve multiple highly-mobile user equipments (UEs). In the analysis, largest receive…
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…
Hybrid beamforming is considered a key enabler to realize millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications due to its capability of considerably reducing the number of costly and power-hungry radio frequency chains in the transceiver. However, in mmWave MIMO orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems, hybrid beamforming design is challenging because the analog precoder and combiner are required to be shared across the whole employed bandwidth. In this paper, we propose closed-form solutions to the problem of designing the analog precoder/combine…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is an attractive technology to improve the transmission rate of millimetre-wave (mmWave) communication systems. The previous {research} on RIS technology mainly focused on improving the transmission rate and security rate of the mmWave communication systems. Since the emergence of RIS technology creates the conditions for generating an intelligent radio environment, it also has potential advantages on improving the localization accuracy of the mmWave communication systems. Deployed on walls and objects, RISs are capable of significantly improving commun…
The wide bandwidths offered at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies have made them an attractive choice for future wireless communication systems. Recent works have presented beamforming strategies for enabling in-band full-duplex (FD) capability at mmWave even under the constraints of hybrid beamforming, extending the exciting possibilities of next-generation wireless. Existing mmWave FD designs, however, do not consider frequency-selective mmWave channels. Wideband communication at mmWave suggests that frequency-selectivity will likely be of concern since communication channels will be on th…
As a cost-effective alternative, hybrid analog and digital beamforming architecture is a promising scheme for millimeter wave (mmWave) system. This paper considers two hybrid beamforming architectures, i.e. the partially-connected and fully-connected structures, for mmWave dual-function radar communication (DFRC) system, where the transmitter communicates with the downlink users and detects radar targets simultaneously. The optimization problems are formulated by minimizing a weighted summation of radar and communication performance, subject to constant modulus and power constraints. To tackle…
Full-duplex (FD) systems gained enormous attention because of the potential to double the spectral efficiency. In the context of 5G technology, FD systems operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies become one of the most promising solutions to further increase the spectral efficiency and reduce the latency. However, such systems are vulnerable to the self-interference (SI) that significantly degrades the performance. To overcome this shortcoming, analog-only beamforming techniques have been developed to mitigate the SI. Because of the huge power consumption, systems operating at mmWave …
Mobile edge computing (MEC) and millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are capable of significantly reducing the network's delay and enhancing its capacity. In this paper we investigate a mmWave and device-to-device (D2D) assisted MEC system, in which user A carries out some computational tasks and shares the results with user B with the aid of a base station (BS). We propose a novel two-timescale joint hybrid beamforming and task allocation algorithm to reduce the system latency whilst cut down the required signaling overhead. Specifically, the high-dimensional analog beamforming matrices ar…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found widespread commercial, civilian, and military applications. Wireless communication has always been one of the core technologies for UAV. However, the communication capacity is becoming a bottleneck for UAV to support more challenging application scenarios. The heavily-occupied sub-6 GHz frequency band is not sufficient to meet the ultra high-data-traffic requirements. The utilization of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands is a promising direction for UAV communications, where large antenna arrays can be packed in a small area on the UAV to pe…
Millimeter wave sensing has recently attracted a lot of attention given its environmental robust nature. In situations where visual sensors like cameras fail to perform, mmwave radars can be used to achieve reliable performance. However, because of the poor scattering performance and lack of texture in millimeter waves, radars can not be used in several situations that require precise identification of objects. In this paper, we take insight from camera fiducials which are very easily identifiable by the camera, and present R-fiducial tags, which smartly augment the current infrastructure to e…
In this paper, we propose a beamforming design for dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems at the millimeter wave (mmWave) band, where hybrid beamforming and sub-arrayed MIMO radar techniques are jointly exploited. We assume that a base station (BS) is serving a user equipment (UE) located in a Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) channel, which in the meantime actively detects multiple targets located in a Line-of-Sight (LoS) channel. Given the optimal communication beamformer and the desired radar beampattern, we propose to design the analog and digital beamformers under non-convex constant-m…
In this paper, we address the problem of three dimensional beamforming in millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless networks. In particular, we study the impact of base station (BS) antenna tilt angle optimization on the energy efficiency (EE) of mmWave networks under two different scenarios: a homogeneous network consisting of multiple macro base stations (MBSs), and a heterogeneous network where several femto base stations are added within the coverage areas of the MBSs. First, by adopting a stochastic geometry approach, we analyze the coverage probability of both scenarios that incorporate 3DBF. Th…
This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of milliMap, a single-chip millimetre wave (mmWave) radar based indoor mapping system targetted towards low-visibility environments to assist in emergency response. A unique feature of milliMap is that it only leverages a low-cost, off-the-shelf mmWave radar, but can reconstruct a dense grid map with accuracy comparable to lidar, as well as providing semantic annotations of objects on the map. milliMap makes two key technical contributions. First, it autonomously overcomes the sparsity and multi-path noise of mmWave signals by combi…
Efficient Dual-Blind Deconvolution for Joint Radar-Communication Systems Using ADMM: Enhancing Channel Estimation and Signal Recovery in 5G mmWave Networks
Analog/digital hybrid beamforming architectures with large-scale antenna arrays have been widely considered in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems because they can address the tradeoff between performance and hardware efficiency compared with traditional fully-digital beamforming. Most of the prior work on hybrid beamforming focused on fullyconnected architecture or partially-connected scheme with fixedsubarrays, in which the analog beamformers are usually realized by infinite-resolution phase shifters (PSs). In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid beamforming architecture with d…
Millimeter-wave radars are being increasingly integrated into commercial vehicles to support advanced driver-assistance system features. A key shortcoming for present-day vehicular radar imaging is poor azimuth resolution (for side-looking operation) due to the form factor limits on antenna size and placement. In this paper, we propose a solution via a new multiple-input and multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) imaging technique, that applies coherent SAR principles to vehicular MIMO radar to improve the side-view (angular) resolution. The proposed 2-stage hierarchical MIMO-SAR …
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems relying on hybrid beamforming structures are capable of achieving high spectral efficiency at a low hardware complexity and low power consumption. In this paper, we propose an RIS-assisted mmWave point-to-point system relying on dynamically configured sub-array connected hybrid beamforming structures. More explicitly, an energy-efficient analog beamformer relying on twin-resolution phase shifters is proposed. Then, we conceive a successive interference cancelation (SIC) based method for jointly des…
Beamforming technology is widely used in millimeter wave systems to combat path losses, and beamformers are usually selected from a predefined codebook. Unfortunately, the traditional codebook design neglects the beam squint effect, and this will cause severe performance degradation when the bandwidth is large. In this letter, we consider that a codebook with fixed size is adopted in the wideband beamforming system. First, we analyze how beam squint affects system performance when all beams have the same width. The expression of average spectrum efficiency is derived based on the ideal beam pa…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication represents one of the main innovations of the next generation of wireless technologies, allowing users to reach unprecedented data rates. To overcome the high path loss at mmWave frequencies, these systems make use of directional antennas able to focus the transmit power into narrow beams using BeamForming (BF) techniques, thus making the communication directional. This new paradigm opens up a set of challenges for the design of efficient wireless systems, in which antenna and BF components play an important role also at the higher layer of the protocol s…
This work develops LoneSTAR, a novel enabler of full-duplex millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems through the design of analog beamforming codebooks. LoneSTAR codebooks deliver high beamforming gain and broad coverage while simultaneously reducing the self-interference coupled by transmit and receive beams at a full-duplex mmWave transceiver. Our design framework accomplishes this by tolerating some variability in transmit and receive beamforming gain to strategically shape beams that reject self-interference spatially while accounting for digitally-controlled analog beamforming netwo…
In recent years, there has been extensive research on millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication and on in-band full-duplex (FD) communication, but work on the combination of the two is relatively lacking. FD mmWave systems could offer increased spectral efficiency and decreased latency while also suggesting the redesign of existing mmWave applications. While FD technology has been well-explored for sub-6 GHz systems, the developed methods do not translate well to mmWave. This turns us to a method called beamforming cancellation (BFC), where the highly directional mmWave beams are steered to mitig…
In this letter, secure beamforming in a multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) system is investigated. In this system, the secrecy rate is maximized by controlling the on-off status of each IRS as well as optimizing the phase shift matrix of the IRSs. This problem is posed as a joint optimization problem of transmit beamforming and IRS control, whose goal is to maximize the secrecy rate under the total transmission power and unit-modulus constraints. The problem is difficult to solve optimally due to the nonconvexity of constraint conditions and coupled …
We consider an integrated access and backhaul (IAB) node operating in full-duplex (FD) mode. We analyze simultaneous transmission from the New Radio gNB to the IAB node on the backhaul uplink, IAB node to a user equipment (UE) on the access downlink, and IAB transmitter to the IAB receiver on the self-interference (SI) channel. Our contributions include (1) a low complexity algorithm to jointly design the hybrid analog/digital beamformers for all three nodes to maximize the sum spectral efficiency of the access and backhaul links by canceling SI and maximizing received power; (2) derivation of…
This paper considers a lens antenna array-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) system. The base station's beam selection matrix and user terminals' phase-only beamformers are jointly designed with the aim of maximizing the uplink sum rate. In order to deal with the formulated mixed-integer optimization problem, a penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based iterative algorithm is developed via capitalizing on the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE), block coordinate descent (BCD), and minorization-maximization (MM) techniques. Moreover, a low-co…
mmWave radars have recently gathered significant attention as a means to track human movement within indoor environments. Widely adopted Kalman filter tracking methods experience performance degradation when the underlying movement is highly non-linear or presents long-term temporal dependencies. As a solution, in this article we design a convolutional-recurrent Neural Network (NN) that learns to accurately estimate the position and the velocity of the monitored subjects from high dimensional radar data. The NN is trained as a probabilistic model, utilizing a Gaussian negative log-likelihood l…
The high overhead of the beam training process is the main challenge when establishing mmWave communication links, especially for vehicle-to-everything (V2X) scenarios where the channels are highly dynamic. In this paper, we obtain prior information to speed up the beam training process by implementing two deep neural networks (DNNs) that realize radar-to-communication (R2C) channel information translation in a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) system. Specifically, the first DNN is built to extract the information from the radar azimuth power spectrum (APS) to reconstruct the communication APS,…
This paper explores an integrated approach for improved sensing and positioning with applications in air traffic management (ATM) and in the Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS). The integrated approach includes the synergy of 3D Vector Antenna with the novel time-of-arrival and angle-of-arrival estimate methods for accurate positioning, combining the sensing on the sub-6GHz and mmWave spectrum for the enhanced non-cooperative surveillance. For the positioning scope, both uplink and downlink 5G reference signals are investigated and their performance is evaluated. Fo…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications provide access to spectra with bandwidths and in abundance. However, the high susceptibility of mmWave to blockage imposes crucial challenges, especially to low-latency services. In this paper, a novel intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted mmWave scheme is proposed to overcome the impact of blockage. New methods are developed to minimize the user power for a multi-user mmWave system by jointly optimizing individual device power, multi-user detection matrix and passive beamforming, subject to delay requirements. An alternating optimization framewo…
In this paper, we investigate the secure beamforming design in an intelligent reflection surface (IRS) assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) system, where the hybrid beamforming (HB) and the passive beamforming (PB) are employed by the transmitter and the IRS, respectively. To maximize the secrecy capacity, the joint optimization of HB and PB is formulated as a nonconvex problem with constant-modulus constraints. To efficiently solve such a challenging problem, the original problem is decomposed into a PB subproblem and an HB subproblem, then these two subproblems are sequentially solved by propos…
Switch-based hybrid network is a promising implementation for beamforming in large-scale millimetre wave (mmWave) antenna arrays. By fully exploiting the sparse nature of the mmWave channel, such hybrid beamforming reduces complexity and power consumption when compared with a structure based on phase shifters. However, the difficulty of designing an optimum beamformer in the analog domain is prohibitive due to the binary nature of such a switch-based structure. Thus, here we propose a new method for designing a switch-based hybrid beamformer for massive MIMO communications in mmWave bands. We …
Joint radar-communications (JRC) benefits from multi-functionality of radar and communication operations using same hardware and radio frequency (RF) spectrum resources. Thus JRC systems possess very high potential to be employed into the sixth generation (6G) standards. This paper designs a flexible beamformer for multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) JRC with maximized spectral efficiency (SE). Hybrid beamforming is implemented which constitutes lesser number of RF chains than number of transmitter antennas. We jointly express JRC rate with communication and radar entities including a weight…
In this paper, we propose a radar-assisted predictive beamforming design for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication by relying on the joint sensing and communication functionalities at road side units (RSUs). We present a novel extended Kalman filtering (EKF) framework to track and predict kinematic parameters of the vehicle. By exploiting the radar functionality of the RSU we show that the communication beam tracking overheads can be drastically reduced. Numerical results have demonstrated that the proposed radar-assisted approach significantly outperforms the communication-only feedba…
Cognitive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is capable of adjusting system parameters adaptively by sensing and learning in complex dynamic environment. Beamforming performance of MIMO radar is guided by both beamforming weight coefficients and the transceiver configuration. We propose a cognitive-driven MIMO array design where both the beamforming weights and the transceiver configuration are adaptively and concurrently optimized under different environmental conditions. The perception-action cycle involves data collection of full virtual array, covariance reconstruction and joint d…
Recently, full duplex (FD) has been studied in 5G LTE millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular communications for New Radio in 3GPP releases 15-17. FD allows bidirectional transmission over the same resources and has the potential to reduce latency and double spectral efficiency. Self-interference (SI) is the primary drawback. SI can be several orders of magnitude greater than the received signal power, saturate the analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and degrade communication performance severely. Massive mmWave antenna arrays may provide enough degrees of freedom for spatial multiplexing and SI sup…
