Millimeter-Wave (mm-Wave) frequency bands provide an opportunity for much wider channel bandwidth compared with the traditional sub-6 GHz band. Communication at mm-Waves is, however, quite challenging due to the severe propagation path loss. To cope with this problem, directional beamforming both at the Base Station (BS) side and at the user side is necessary in order to establish a strong path conveying enough signal power. Finding such beamforming directions is referred to as the Beam Alignment (BA) and is known to be a challenging problem. This paper presents a new scheme for efficient BA, based on the estimated second order channel statistics. As a result, our proposed algorithm is highly robust to variations of the channel time-dynamics compared with other proposed approaches based on the estimation of the channel coefficients, rather than of their second-order statistics. In the proposed scheme, the BS probes the channel in the Downlink (DL) letting each user to estimate its own path direction. All the users within the BS coverage are trained simultaneously, without requiring "beam refinement" with multiple interactive rounds of Downlink/Uplink (DL/UL) transmissions, as done in other schemes. Thus, the training overhead of the proposed BA scheme is independent of the number of users in the system. We pose the channel estimation at the user side as a Compressed Sensing (CS) of a non-negative signal and use the recently developed Non-Negative Least Squares (NNLS) technique to solve it efficiently. The performance of our proposed algorithm is assessed via computer simulation in a relevant mm-Wave scenario. The results illustrate that our approach is superior to the state-of-the-art BA schemes proposed in the literature in terms of training overhead in multi-user scenarios and robustness to variations in the channel dynamics.
Hybrid digital analog (HDA) beamforming has attracted considerable attention in practical implementation of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems due to the low power consumption with respect to its fully digital baseband counterpart. The implementation cost, performance, and power efficiency of HDA beamforming depends on the level of connectivity and reconfigurability of the analog beamforming network. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two typical architectures that can be regarded as extreme cases, namely, the fully-connected (FC) and the one-stream-per-subarray (OSPS) architectures. In the FC architecture each RF antenna port is connected to all antenna elements of the array, while in the OSPS architecture the RF antenna ports are connected to disjoint subarrays. We jointly consider the initial beam acquisition and data communication phases, such that the latter takes place by using the beam direction information obtained by the former. We use the state-of-the-art beam alignment (BA) scheme previously proposed by the authors and consider a family of MU-MIMO precoding schemes well adapted to the beam information extracted from the BA phase. We also evaluate the power efficiency of the two HDA architectures taking into account the power dissipation at different hardware components as well as the power backoff under typical power amplifier constraints. Numerical results show that the two architectures achieve similar sum spectral efficiency, while the OSPS architecture is advantageous with respect to the FC case in terms of hardware complexity and power efficiency, at the sole cost of a slightly longer BA time-to-acquisition due to its reduced beam angle resolution. Index TermsX.
Communication at millimeter wave (mmWave) bands is expected to become a key ingredient of next generation (5G) wireless networks. Effective mmWave communications require fast and reliable methods for beamforming at both the User Equipment (UE) and the Base Station (BS) sides, in order to achieve a sufficiently large Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) after beamforming. We refer to the problem of finding a pair of strongly coupled narrow beams at the transmitter and receiver as the Beam Alignment (BA) problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient BA scheme for single-carrier mmWave communications.In the proposed scheme, the BS periodically probes the channel in the downlink via a pre-specified pseudo-random beamforming codebook and pseudo-random spreading codes, letting each UE estimate the Angle-of-Arrival / Angle-of-Departure (AoA-AoD) pair of the multipath channel for which the energy transfer is maximum. We leverage the sparse nature of mmWave channels in the AoA-AoD domain to formulate the BA problem as the estimation of a sparse non-negative vector. Based on the recently developed Non-Negative Least Squares (NNLS) technique, we efficiently find the strongest AoA-AoD pair connecting each UE to the BS. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme under a realistic channel model, where the propagation channel consists of a few multipath scattering components each having different delays, AoAs-AoDs, and Doppler shifts. The channel model parameters are consistent with experimental channel measurements. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method is highly robust to fast channel variations caused by the large Doppler spread between the multipath components.Furthermore, we also show that after achieving BA the beamformed channel is essentially frequency-flat, such that single-carrier communication needs no equalization in the time domain.
Hybrid digital analog (HDA) beamforming has attracted considerable attention in practical implementation of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems due to its low power consumption with respect to its digital baseband counterpart. The implementation cost, performance, and power efficiency of HDA beamforming depends on the level of connectivity and reconfigurability of the analog beamforming network. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two typical architectures for HDA MU-MIMO, i.e., the fully-connected (FC) architecture where each RF antenna port is connected to all antenna elements of the array, and the one-stream-per-subarray (OSPS) architecture where the RF antenna ports are connected to disjoint subarrays. We jointly consider the initial beam acquisition phase and data communication phase, such that the latter takes place by using the beam direction information obtained in the former phase. For each phase, we propose our own BA and precoding schemes that outperform the counterparts in the literature. We also evaluate the power efficiency of the two HDA architectures taking into account the practical hardware impairments, e.g., the power dissipation at different hardware components as well as the potential power backoff under typical power amplifier (PA) constraints. Numerical results show that the two architectures achieve similar sum spectral efficiency, but the OSPS architecture outperforms the FC case in terms of hardware complexity and power efficiency, only at the cost of a slightly longer time of initial beam acquisition.
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