Design and Analysis of Transmit Beamforming for Millimetre Wave Base Station Discovery

In this paper, we develop an analytical framework for the initial access (a.k.a. Base Station (BS) discovery) in a millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication system and propose an effective strategy for transmitting the Reference Signals (RSs) used for BS discovery. Specifically, by formulating the problem of BS discovery at User Equipments (UEs) as hypothesis tests, we derive a detector based on the Generalised Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) and characterise the statistical behaviour of the detector. The theoretical results obtained allow analysis of the impact of key system parameters on the performance of BS discovery, and show that RS transmission with narrow beams may not be helpful in improving the overall BS discovery performance due to the cost of spatial scanning. Using the method of large deviations, we identify the desirable beam pattern that minimises the average miss-discovery probability of UEs within a targeted detectable region. We then propose to transmit the RS with sequential scanning, using a pre-designed codebook with narrow and/or wide beams to approximate the desirable patterns. The proposed design allows flexible choices of the codebook sizes and the associated beam widths to better approximate the desirable patterns. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, submitte

Phase only transmit beamforming for spectrum sharing microwave systems

This paper deals with the problem of phase-only transmit beamforming in spectrum sharing microwave systems. In contrast to sub-6 GHz schemes, general microwave systems require a large number of antennas due to its huge path loss. As a consequence, digital beamforming needs a large number of computational resources compared to analog beamforming, which only needs a single radio-frequency chain, results the less computational demanding solution. Analog schemes are usually composed by a phase shifter network whose elements transmit at a certain fixed power so that the system designer shall compute the phase values for each element given a set of directions. This approach leads to non-convex quadratic problems where the traditional semidefinite relaxation fails to deliver satisfactory outcomes. In order to solve this, we propose a nonsmooth method that behaves well in several scenarios. Numerical evaluations in different spectrum sharing scenarios, which show the performance of our method, are provided.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

OAM multiple transmission using uniform circular arrays: numerical modeling and experimental verification with two digital television signals

In this work we present the outcomes of a radio-frequency OAM transmission between two antenna arrays performed in a real-world context. The analysis is supplemented by deep simulative investigations able to provide both a preliminary overview of the experimental scenario and a posteriori validation of the achieved results. As a first step, the far-field OAM communication link is tested at various frequencies and the corresponding link budget is studied by means of an angular scan generated by the rotation of the receiving system. Then, on the same site, two digital television signals encoded as OAM modes ($\ell$=1 and $\ell$=-1) are simultaneously transmitted at a common frequency of 198.5 MHz with good mode insulation.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figure

Spatial Multiplexing of QPSK Signals with a Single Radio: Antenna Design and Over-the-Air Experiments

The paper describes the implementation and performance analysis of the first fully-operational beam-space MIMO antenna for the spatial multiplexing of two QPSK streams. The antenna is composed of a planar three-port radiator with two varactor diodes terminating the passive ports. Pattern reconfiguration is used to encode the MIMO information onto orthogonal virtual basis patterns in the far-field. A measurement campaign was conducted to compare the performance of the beam-space MIMO system with a conventional 2-by-?2 MIMO system under realistic propagation conditions. Propagation measurements were conducted for both systems and the mutual information and symbol error rates were estimated from Monte-Carlo simulations over the measured channel matrices. The results show the beam-space MIMO system and the conventional MIMO system exhibit similar finite-constellation capacity and error performance in NLOS scenarios when there is sufficient scattering in the channel. In comparison, in LOS channels, the capacity performance is observed to depend on the relative polarization of the receiving antennas.Comment: 31 pages, 23 figure