Low overhead channel estimation based on compressive sensing (CS) has been widely investigated for hybrid wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The channel sparsifying dictionaries used in prior work are built from ideal array response vectors evaluated on discrete angles of arrival/departure. In addition, these dictionaries are assumed to be the same for all subcarriers, without considering the impacts of hardware impairments and beam squint. In this manuscript, we derive a general channel and signal model that explicitly incorporates the impacts of hardware impairments, practical pulse shaping functions, and beam squint, overcoming the limitations of mmWave MIMO channel and signal models commonly used in previous work. Then, we propose a dictionary learning (DL) algorithm to obtain the sparsifying dictionaries embedding hardware impairments, by considering the effect of beam squint without introducing it into the learning process. We also design a novel CS channel estimation algorithm under beam squint and hardware impairments, where the channel structures at different subcarriers are exploited to enable channel parameter estimation with low complexity and high accuracy. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DL and channel estimation strategy when applied to realistic mmWave channels.
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…
In this article, we discuss the potential of radio frequency (RF) lens for ultra-wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. In terms of the beam squint, we compare the proposed RF lens antenna with the phase shifter-based array for hybrid beamforming. To reduce the complexities for fully digital beamforming, researchers have come up with RF lens-based hybrid beamforming. The use of mmWave systems, however, causes an increase in bandwidth, which gives rise to the beam squint phenomenon. We first find the causative factors for beam squint in the dielectric RF lens antenna. Based on the beamformi…
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a key technology for next generation wireless networks. One of the consequences of utilizing a large number of antennas with an increased bandwidth is that array steering vectors vary among different subcarriers. Due to this effect, known as beam squint, the conventional channel model is no longer applicable for mmWave massive MIMO systems. In this paper, we study channel estimation under the resulting non-standard model. To that aim, we first analyze the beam squint effect from an array signal processing perspecti…
Channel estimation is challenging for hybrid millimeter wave (mmWave) large-scale antenna arrays which are promising in 5G/B5G applications. The challenges are associated with angular resolution losses resulting from hybrid front-ends, beam squinting, and susceptibility to the receiver noises. Based on tensor signal processing, this paper presents a novel multi-dimensional approach to channel parameter estimation with large-scale mmWave hybrid uniform circular cylindrical arrays (UCyAs) which are compact in size and immune to mutual coupling but known to suffer from infinite-dimensional array …
Substantial growth of demand for mobile data and rapidly increasing spread of personal communication devices such as smart phones and tablets is the major challenge faced by the mobile service providers in recent years. The allotted spectrum for the currently operating mobile communication systems have been saturated in the last few years by such a considerable rate that the future fifth generation network would not be able to operate without applying new frequencies. In accordance with the concept of 5G, millimeter wave frequency band will also be used along with the currently used frequency …
In wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, channel estimation is challenging due to the hybrid analog-digital architecture, which compresses the received pilot signal and makes channel estimation a compressive sensing (CS) problem. However, existing high-performance CS algorithms usually suffer from high complexity. On the other hand, the beam squint effect caused by huge bandwidth and massive antennas will deteriorate estimation performance. In this paper, frequency-dependent angular dictionaries are first adopted to compensate for beam squint.…
Channel estimation in wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems is very challenging due to the beam squint effect. To solve the problem, we propose a learnable iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm-based channel estimator (LISTA-CE) based on deep learning. The proposed channel estimator can learn to transform the beam-frequency mmWave channel into the domain with sparse features through training data. The transform domain enables us to adopt a simple denoiser with few trainable parameters. We further enhance the adaptivity of the estimator by introducing hypernetwork to automatically gene…
In fifth-generation (5G) communication, the RF lens antenna is introduced with advantages of high antenna gain and low hardware cost in analog/digital hybrid beamforming technology. In this paper, we design and manufacture the appropriate RF lens antenna for mmWave communication identified in simulation analysis and present a real-time mmWave lens MIMO testbed. Furthermore, in conventional phase-shift MIMO, beam-squint, a problem caused by the wideband of mmWave communication, is estimated with the fabricated RF lens antenna.
Beamspace multi-input multi-output (MIMO) relying on lens antenna arrays can significantly reduce the number of radio-frequency chains in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems through beam selection. However, the beamforming gain is actually frequency-dependent in wideband mmWave MIMO systems. This phenomenon is called beam squint, which will deteriorate the system's performance when traditional beam selection methods are used. To solve this problem, we propose a wideband beam selection method for mmWave MIMO systems relying on lens antenna arrays. Firstly, we select one beam with the…
In this work, we investigate the performance of a millimeter waves (mmWaves) cellular system with free space optical (FSO) backhauling. MmWave channels are subject to Nakagami-m fading while the optical links experience the Double Generalized Gamma including atmospheric turbulence, path loss and the misalignment between the transmitter and the receiver aperture (also known as the pointing errors). The FSO model also takes into account the receiver detection technique which could be either heterodyne or intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD). Each user equipment (UE) has to be associ…
Radio localization is applied in high-frequency (e.g., mmWave and THz) systems to support communication and to provide location-based services without extra infrastructure. {For solving localization problems, a simplified, stationary, narrowband far-field channel model is widely used due to its compact formulation.} However, with increased array size in extra-large MIMO systems and increased bandwidth at upper mmWave bands, the effect of channel spatial non-stationarity (SNS), spherical wave model (SWM), and beam squint effect (BSE) cannot be ignored. In this case, localization performance wil…
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…
Accurate channel parameter estimation is challenging for wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) large-scale hybrid arrays, due to beam squint and much fewer radio frequency (RF) chains than antennas. This paper presents a novel joint delay and angle estimation approach for wideband mmWave fully-connected hybrid uniform cylindrical arrays. We first design a new hybrid beamformer to reduce the dimension of received signals on the horizontal plane by exploiting the convergence of the Bessel function, and to reduce the active beams in the vertical direction through preselection. The important recurrenc…
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…
Hybrid analog-digital (HAD) architecture is widely adopted in practical millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to reduce hardware cost and energy consumption. However, channel estimation in the context of HAD is challenging due to only limited radio frequency (RF) chains at transceivers. Although various compressive sensing (CS) algorithms have been developed to solve this problem by exploiting inherent channel sparsity and sparsity structures, practical effects, such as power leakage and beam squint, can still make the real channel features deviate from…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-out (MIMO) systems relying on lens antenna arrays are capable of achieving a high antenna-gain at a considerably reduced number of radio frequency (RF) chains via beam selection. However, the traditional beam selection network suffers from significant performance loss in wideband systems due to the effect of beam squint. In this paper, we propose a phase shifter-aided beam selection network, which enables a single RF chain to support multiple focused-energy beams, for mitigating the beam squint in wideband mmWave MIMO systems. Based on this arch…
In this work, a hybrid free-space optics (FSO)/ teraHertz (THz) based backhaul network is considered to provide high-data rate reliable communication to the terrestrial mobile users (MUs) operating at millimeter wave (mmWave) bands. The FSO link is affected by the atmospheric turbulence and pointing error impairments which are characterized with Gamma-Gamma and Rayleigh fading, respectively. At the FSO receiver, both the intensity modulated direct detection and heterodyne detection techniques are considered. The multi-antenna THz link suffers from both high path-loss and misalignment error. Th…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication links for 5G cellular technology require high beamforming gain to overcome channel impairments and achieve high throughput. While much work has focused on estimating mmWave channels and designing beamforming schemes, the time dynamic nature of mmWave channels quickly renders estimates stale and increases sounding overhead. We model the underlying time dynamic state space of mmWave channels and design sounding beamformers suitable for tracking in a Kalman filtering framework. Given an initial channel estimate, filtering efficiently leads to refined estimat…
Free-space optical (FSO) links are considered as a cost-efficient way to fill the backhaul/fronthaul connectivity gap between millimeter wave (mmWave) access networks and optical fiber based central networks. In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end performance of dual-hop mixed FSO/mmWave systems to address this combined use. The FSO link is modeled as a Gamma-Gamma fading channel using both heterodyne detection and indirect modulation/direct detection with pointing error impairments, while the mmWave link experiences the fluctuating two-ray fading. Under the assumption of both amplify-an…
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…
Exploiting channel sparsity at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies reduces the high training overhead associated with the channel estimation stage. Compressive sensing (CS) channel estimation techniques usually adopt the (overcomplete) wavelet/Fourier transform matrix as a sparsifying dictionary. This may not be the best choice when considering non-uniform arrays, antenna gain/phase errors, mutual coupling effects, etc. We propose two dictionary learning (DL) algorithms to learn the best sparsifying dictionaries for channel matrices from observations obtained with hybrid frequency-selective m…
Beamforming is the primary technology to overcome the high path loss in millimeter-wave (mmWave) channels. Hence, performance improvement needs knowledge and control of the spatial domain. In particular, antenna structure and radiation parameters affect the beamforming performance in mmWave communications systems. In order to address the impairments such as beam misalignments, outage loss, tracking inability, blockage, etc., an optimum value of the beamwidth must be determined. In our previous paper, assuming a communication system that creates a beam per cluster, we theoretically investigated…
Full Duplex (FD) radio has emerged as a promising solution to increase the data rates by up to a factor of two via simultaneous transmission and reception in the same frequency band. This paper studies a novel hybrid beamforming (HYBF) design to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) in a single-cell millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) FD system. Motivated by practical considerations, we assume that the multi-antenna users and hybrid FD base station (BS) suffer from the limited dynamic range (LDR) noise due to non-ideal hardware and an impairment aware HYBF ap…
We present a beamforming algorithm for multiuser wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems where one access point uses hybrid analog/digital beamforming while multiple user stations have phased-arrays with a single RF chain. The algorithm operates in a more general mode than others available in literature and has lower computational complexity and training overhead. Throughout the paper, we describe: i) the construction of novel beamformer sets (codebooks) with wide sector beams and narrow beams based on the orthogonality property of beamformer vectors, ii) a beamforming algorith…
In the past ten years, there have been tremendous research progresses on massive MIMO systems, most of which stand from the communications viewpoint. A new trend of investigating massive MIMO, especially for the sparse scenario like millimeter wave (mmWave) transmission, is to re-build the transceiver design from array signal processing viewpoint that could deeply exploit the half-wavelength array and provide enhanced performances in many aspects. For example, the high dimensional channel could be decomposed into small amount of physical parameters, e.g., angle of arrival (AoA), angle of depar…
Millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz MIMO systems rely on pre-defined beamforming codebooks for both initial access and data transmission. Being pre-defined, however, these codebooks are commonly not optimized for specific environments, user distributions, and/or possible hardware impairments. This leads to large codebook sizes with high beam training overhead which increases the initial access/tracking latency and makes it hard for these systems to support highly mobile applications. To overcome these limitations, this paper develops a deep reinforcement learning framework that learns how t…
Beamforming for mmWave communications is well-studied in the PHY based on the channel parameters to develop optimum receiver processing techniques. However, even before signal processing, antenna structure and radiation parameters affect the beamforming performance primarily. For example, in contrast to common belief, narrow beamwidth (bmW) may result in degraded beamforming performance. In order to address the impairments such as beam misalignments, outage loss, tracking inability, blockage, etc., an optimum value of the bmW must be determined. In this paper, assuming a communication system t…