Secure Communications in Millimeter Wave Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless networks with directional antennas, like millimeter wave (mmWave) networks, have enhanced security. For a large-scale mmWave ad hoc network in which eavesdroppers are randomly located, however, eavesdroppers can still intercept the confidential messages, since they may reside in the signal beam. This paper explores the potential of physical layer security in mmWave ad hoc networks. Specifically, we characterize the impact of mmWave channel characteristics, random blockages, and antenna gains on the secrecy performance. For the special case of uniform linear array (ULA), a tractable approach is proposed to evaluate the average achievable secrecy rate. We also characterize the impact of artificial noise in such networks. Our results reveal that in the low transmit powerregime, the use of low mmWave frequency achieves better secrecy performance, and when increasing transmit power, a transition from low mmWave frequency to high mmWave frequency is demanded for obtaining a higher secrecy rate. More antennas at the transmitting nodes are needed to decrease the antenna gain obtained by the eavesdroppers when using ULA. Eavesdroppers can intercept more information by using a wide beam pattern. Furthermore, the use of artificial noise may be ineffective for enhancing the secrecy rate.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Millimeter Wave Systems for Airports and Short-Range Aviation Communications: A Survey of the Current Channel Models at mmWave Frequencies

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications will play a key role in enhancing the throughput, reliability, and security of next generation wireless networks. These advancements are achieved through the large bandwidth available in this band and through the use of highly directional links that will be used to overcome the large pathloss at these frequencies. Although the terrestrial application of mmWave systems is advancing at a rapid pace, the use of mmWave communication systems in aviation systems or airports is still in its infancy. This can be attributed to the challenges related to radio technology and lack of development, and characterization of mmWave wireless channels for the aviation field and the airport environment. Consequently, one of our goals is to develop methodologies that support mmWave air to ground links, and various links at airports, by applying new localization schemes that allow for application of highly directional links that can be deployed over longer distances despite the high path loss at mmWave frequencies. However, a very thorough understanding of the mmWave channel models are needed to enable such new applications. To this end, in this paper, we present a survey of the current channel models in the mmWave band. The 3-dimensional statistical channel model is also reviewed and its parameters and typical characteristics for this model are identified and computed through simulation for the Boise metropolitan area

Beamforming management and beam training in 5G system

Massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system with beamforming technique is an integral part of upcoming 5G new radio (NR) system. For the upcoming deployment of 5G NR system in both stand-alone (SA) and non-stand-alone (NSA) structure, beamforming plays an important role to achieve its key features and meet the estimated requirement. To be employed with massive MIMO antenna structure, beamforming will allow 5G system to serve several users at a time with better throughput and spectral usage. Beamforming will also minimize the path loss due to high susceptibility of millimetre wave and provide beamforming gain. For a wide range of benefit scheme, beamforming is currently a hot topic regarding the deployment of 5G. With the advantage of both analog and digital beamforming, hybrid beamforming structure can provide better system benchmark performance in terms of cost and flexibility. Switched beam training and adaptive beam training approaches and algorithms are developed in order to reduce training time, signalling overhead and misdetection probability. Some of the approaches and algorithm are addressed in this thesis. Beamforming management ensures the initiation and sustainability of the established link between transmitter and receiver through different processes. Beam tracking helps to keep track of the receiver devices during mobility. As beamforming is related to antenna configuration, near-field spherical wave front incident problem was ignored, and all the references and examples presented in this topic was obtained with a far-field propagation perspective. To avoid mutual coupling between antenna elements and grating lobe problems in antenna radiation pattern, each element is separated by half of the wavelength. This thesis paper aims to provide a broader view into beamforming scenario, starting from the basics of beamforming to training the beams and management aspects in the hardware part of 5G structure. Another goal is to present the necessity of beamforming in a 5G system by stating different benefits scheme such as spatial diversity, interference suppression, energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and so on. These benefits are justified by evaluating various research paper and MATLAB simulations

Design and Realization of Fully-digital Microwave and Mm-wave Multi-beam Arrays with FPGA/RF-SOC Signal Processing

There has been a constant increase in data-traffic and device-connections in mobile wireless communications, which led the fifth generation (5G) implementations to exploit mm-wave bands at 24/28 GHz. The next-generation wireless access point (6G and beyond) will need to adopt large-scale transceiver arrays with a combination of multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) theory and fully digital multi-beam beamforming. The resulting high gain array factors will overcome the high path losses at mm-wave bands, and the simultaneous multi-beams will exploit the multi-directional channels due to multi-path effects and improve the signal-to-noise ratio. Such access points will be based on electronic systems which heavily depend on the integration of RF electronics with digital signal processing performed in Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA)/ RF-system-on-chip (SoC). This dissertation is directed towards the investigation and realization of fully-digital phased arrays that can produce wideband simultaneous multi-beams with FPGA or RF-SoC digital back-ends. The first proposed approach is a spatial bandpass (SBP) IIR filter-based beamformer, and is based on the concepts of space-time network resonance. A 2.4 GHz, 16-element array receiver, has been built for real-time experimental verification of this approach. The second and third approaches are respectively based on Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) theory, and a lens plus focal planar array theory. Lens based approach is essentially an analog model of DFT. These two approaches are verified for a 28 GHz 800 MHz mm-wave implementation with RF-SoC as the digital back-end. It has been shown that for all proposed multibeam beamformer implementations, the measured beams are well aligned with those of the simulated. The proposed approaches differ in terms of their architectures, hardware complexity and costs, which will be discussed as this dissertation opens up. This dissertation also presents an application of multi-beam approaches for RF directional sensing applications to explore white spaces within the spatio-temporal spectral regions. A real-time directional sensing system is proposed to capture the white spaces within the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band. Further, this dissertation investigates the effect of electro-magnetic (EM) mutual coupling in antenna arrays on the real-time performance of fully-digital transceivers. Different algorithms are proposed to uncouple the mutual coupling in digital domain. The first one is based on finding the MC transfer function from the measured S-parameters of the antenna array and employing it in a Frost FIR filter in the beamforming backend. The second proposed method uses fast algorithms to realize the inverse of mutual coupling matrix via tridiagonal Toeplitz matrices having sparse factors. A 5.8 GHz 32-element array and 1-7 GHz 7-element tightly coupled dipole array (TCDA) have been employed to demonstrate the proof-of-concept of these algorithms

Analysis of the sum rate for massive MIMO using 10 GHz measurements

Orientador: Gustavo FraidenraichTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Este trabalho apresenta um conjunto de contribuições para caracterização e modelagem de canais reais de rádio abordando aspectos relacionados com as condições favoráveis de propagação para sistemas massive MIMO. Discutiremos como caracterizar canais de rádio em um ambiente real, processamento de dados e análise das condições favoráveis de propagação. Em uma segunda parte, focamos na determinação teórica de alguns aspectos da tecnologia de massive MIMO utilizando propriedades de distribuições matriciais Wishart. Inicialmente, apresentamos uma contribuição sobre a aplicação do algoritmo ESPRIT, para estimar parâmetros de um conjunto de dados multidimensional. Obtivemos dados por varredura em frequência de um Analisador Vetorial de Rede e os adaptamos para o algoritmo ESPRIT. Mostramos como remover a influência do ganho de padrão de antenas e como utilizar um gerador de modelo de canal baseado nas medidas reais de canal de rádio. As medidas foram feitas na frequência de 10.1 GHz com largura de faixa de 500 MHz. Utilizando um gerador de modelo de canal, fomos além do universo das simulações por distribuições Gaussianas. Introduzimos o conceito de propagação favorável e analisamos condições de linha-de-visada usando arranjos lineares uniformes e arranjos retangulares uniformes de antena. Como novidade da pesquisa, mostramos os benefícios de explorar um número extra de graus de liberdade devido à escolha dos formatos de arranjo de antenas e ao aumento do número de elementos. Esta propriedade é observada ao analisarmos a distribuição dos autovalores de matrizes Gramianas. Em seguida, estendemos o mesmo raciocínio para as matrizes de canal geradas a partir de informações reais e verificamos se as propriedades ainda permaneceriam válidas. Na segunda parte deste trabalho, incluímos mais de uma antena no terminal móvel e calculamos a probabilidade de indisponibilidade para várias configurações de antenas e número arbitrário de usuários. Esboçamos inicialmente a formulação para a informação mútua e, em seguida, calculamos os resultados exatos em uma situação com dois usuários e duas antenas, tanto na estação base (EB) como nos terminais de usuário(TU). Visto que as formulações para a derivação exata dos casos com mais antenas e mais usuários mostrou-se muito intrincada, propusemos uma aproximação Gaussiana para simplificar o problema. Esta aproximação foi validada por simulações Monte Carlo para diferentes relações sinal/ruídoAbstract: This thesis presents a set of contributions for channel modeling and characterization of real radio channels delineating aspects related with the favorable propagation for massive MIMO systems. We will discuss about how to proceed for characterizing radio channels in an real environment , data processing, and analysis of favorable conditions. In a second part, we focused on determination of some theoretical aspects of the Massive MIMO technology using properties of Wishart distribution matrices. We initially present a contribution on the application of ESPRIT algorithm for estimating a multidimensional set of measured data. We have obtained data by frequency sweep carried out by a vector network analyzer(VNA) and adapted it to fit in the ESPRIT algorithm. We show how to remove antenna pattern gain using virtual antenna arrays and how to use a channel model generator based on radio channel measurements of real environments. The measurements were conducted at the frequency of 10.1 GHz and 500 MHz bandwidth. By using a channel model generator, we have explored beyond the simulation of Gaussian Distributions. We will introduce the concept of favorable propagation and analyze the line-of-sight conditions using ULA and URA array shapes. As a research novelty, we will show the benefits of exploiting an extra degree of freedom due to the choice of the antenna shapes and amount of antenna elements. We observe these properties through the distribution of the Gramian Matrices. Next, we extend the same rationale to channel matrices generated from real channels and we verify that the properties are still valid. In a second part of the research work, we included more than one antenna in the mobile terminals and calculated the outage probability for several antenna configurations and arbitrary number users. We introduce a formulation for mutual information and then we calculate exact results in a case with two users with two antennas in both Base Station (BS) and User Terminals (UT). Since the formulations to the exact derivation for cases with more antennas and users seems to be intricate, we propose a Gaussian approximation solution to simplify the problem. We validated this approximation with Monte Carlo simulations for different signal-to-noise ratiosDoutoradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaDoutor em Engenharia Elétrica248416/2013-8CNPQCAPE

Técnicas de equalização iterativa para arquiteturas híbridas sub-conectadas na banda de ondas milimétricas

Mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica e TelecomunicaçõesThe millimeter wave communications and the use of a massive number of antennas are two promising technologies that being combined allow to achieve the multi Gb/s required by future 5G wireless systems. As this type of systems has a high number of antennas it is impossible to use a fully digital architecture, due to hardware limitations. Therefore, the design of signal processing techniques for hybrid analog-digital architectures is a requirement. Depending on the structure of the analog part the hybrid analog-digital architectures may be fully connected or sub-connected. Although the fully connected hybrid architectures allow to connect all RF chains to any antenna element, they involve a high cost due to its structural and computational complexity. As such, the sub-connected hybrid architectures become more attractive, since either at the hardware level or from the computational point of view they are less demanding. In this dissertation, we propose a hybrid iterative block multiuser equalizer for sub-connected millimeter wave massive MIMO systems. The user terminal transceiver has low-complexity and as such employ a pure analog random precoder, with a single RF chain. For the base station, a sub-connected hybrid analog-digital equalizer is designed to remove the multiuser interference. The hybrid equalizer is optimized using the average bit-error-rate as a metric. Due to the coupling between the RF chains in the optimization problem the computation of the optimal solution is way too complex. To address this problem, we compute the analog part of the equalizer sequentially over the RF chains using a dictionary built from the array response vectors. The proposed sub-connected hybrid iterative multiuser equalizer is compared with a recently proposed fully connected hybrid analog-digital approach and with the fully digital architecture. The results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is close to the fully connected hybrid approach after just a few iterations.As comunicações na banda das ondas milimétricas e o uso massivo de antenas são duas tecnologias promissoras que, sendo combinadas permitem alcançar elevadas taxas de transmissão, na ordem dos multi Gb/s, exigidas pelos futuros sistemas sem fios da 5G. Como estes sistemas possuem um número elevado de antenas, torna-se impossível o uso de uma arquitetura totalmente digital devido às limitações de hardware. Desta forma, é necessário projetar técnicas de processamento de sinal para arquiteturas híbridas analógico-digitais. Dentro das arquiteturas híbridas, foram propostas duas formas de lidar com a parte analógica, que são, a forma totalmente conectada e a forma sub-conectada. Embora as arquiteturas híbridas totalmente conectadas permitam interligar todas as cadeias RF a qualquer elemento de antena, estas envolvem um elevado custo devido à sua complexidade estrutural e computacional. Assim sendo, as arquiteturas híbridas sub-conectadas tornam-se mais atraentes pois são menos exigentes do ponto de vista computacional, bem como ao nível do hardware. Nesta dissertação, é proposto um equalizador iterativo para um sistema com uma arquitetura hibrida sub-conectada, com múltiplos utilizadores e um número massivo de antenas a operar na banda das ondas milimétricas. Os terminais dos utilizadores têm baixa complexidade e utilizam pré-codificadores aleatórios analógicos puros, cada um com uma única cadeia RF. Para a estação base, projetou-se um equalizador híbrido analógico-digital de arquitectura sub-conectada, para remover a interferência multiutilizador. O equalizador híbrido é otimizado usando a taxa média de erro de bit como métrica. Devido ao acoplamento entre as cadeias de RF no problema de otimização, o cálculo das soluções ótimas possui elevada complexidade. Para ultrapassar este problema, calculou-se a parte analógica de cada cadeia de RF do equalizador de forma sequencial, usando um dicionário construído a partir da resposta do agregado de antenas. Compara-se o equalizador iterativo híbrido para sistemas multiutilizador de arquitectura sub-conectada proposto com uma abordagem híbrida analógica/digital totalmente conectada, recentemente proposta na literatura e com uma arquitetura totalmente digital. Os resultados mostram que o desempenho do esquema proposto aproximasse da abordagem híbrida totalmente conectada após apenas algumas iterações

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) Communications in Wireless Cellular Networks

An integrated access and backhaul (IAB) network architecture can enable flexible and fast deployment of next-generation cellular networks. However, mutual interference between access and backhaul links, small inter-site distance and spatial dynamics of user distribution pose major challenges in the practical deployment of IAB networks. To tackle these problems, we leverage the flying capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as hovering IAB-nodes and propose an interference management algorithm to maximize the overall sum rate of the IAB network. In particular, we jointly optimize the user and base station associations, the downlink power allocations for access and backhaul transmissions, and the spatial configurations of UAVs. We consider two spatial configuration modes of UAVs: distributed UAVs and drone antenna array (DAA), and show how they are intertwined with the spatial distribution of ground users. Our numerical results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average of 2.9× and 6.7× gains in the received downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and overall network sum rate, respectively. Finally, the numerical results reveal that UAVs cannot only be used for coverage improvement but also for capacity boosting in IAB cellular networks