Advanced Techniques for High-Throughput Cellular Communications

The next generation wireless communication systems require ubiquitous high-throughput mobile connectivity under a range of challenging network settings (urban versus rural, high device density, mobility, etc). To improve the performance of the system, the physical layer design is of great importance. The previous research on improving the physical layer properties includes: a) highly directional transmissions that can enhance the throughput and spatial reuse; b) enhanced MIMO that can eliminate contention, enabling linear increase of capacity with number of antennas; c) mmWave technologies which operate on GHz bandwidth to over substantially higher throughput; d) better cooperative spectrum sharing with cognitive radios; e) better multiple access method which can mitigate multiuser interference and allow more multi-users. This dissertation addresses several techniques in the physical layer design of the next generation wireless communication systems. In chapter two, an orthogonal frequency division with code division multiple access (OFDM-CDMA) systems is proposed and a polyphase code is used to improve multiple access performance and make the OFDM signal satisfy the peak to average ratio (PAPR) constraint. Chapter three studies the I/Q imbalance for direct down converter. For wideband transmitter and receiver that use direct conversion for I/Q sampling, the I/Q imbalance becomes a critical issue. With higher I/Q imbalance, there will be higher degradation in quadrature amplitude modulation, which degrades the throughput tremendously. Chapter four investigate a problem of spectrum sharing for cognitive wideband communication. An energy-efficient sub-Nyquist sampling algorithm is developed for optimal sampling and spectrum sensing. In chapter ve, we study the channel estimation of millimeter wave full-dimensional MIMO communication. The problem is formulated as an atomic-norm minimization problem and algorithms are derived for the channel estimation in different situations. In this thesis, mathematical optimization is applied as the main approach to analyze and solve the problems in the physical layer of wireless communication so that the high-throughput is achieved. The algorithms are derived along with the theoretical analysis, which are validated with numerical results

DNN-DANM: A High-Accuracy Two-Dimensional DOA Estimation Method Using Practical RIS

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) or intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been an attractive technology for future wireless communication and sensing systems. However, in the practical RIS, the mutual coupling effect among RIS elements, the reflection phase shift, and amplitude errors will degrade the RIS performance significantly. This paper investigates the two-dimensional direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem in the scenario using a practical RIS. After formulating the system model with the mutual coupling effect and the reflection phase/amplitude errors of the RIS, a novel DNNDANM method is proposed for the DOA estimation by combining the deep neural network (DNN) and the decoupling atomic norm minimization (DANM). The DNN step reconstructs the received signal from the one with RIS impairments, and the DANM step exploits the signal sparsity in the two-dimensional spatial domain. Additionally, a semi-definite programming (SDP) method with low computational complexity is proposed to solve the atomic minimization problem. Finally, both simulation and prototype are carried out to show estimation performance, and the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in the two-dimensional DOA estimation with low complexity in the scenario with practical RIS.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure

NoncovANM: Gridless DOA Estimation for LPDF System

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation is an important research in the area of array signal processing, and has been studied for decades. High resolution DOA estimation requires large array aperture, which leads to the increase of hardware cost. Besides, high accuracy DOA estimation methods usually have high computational complexity. In this paper, the problem of decreasing the hardware cost and algorithm complexity is addressed. First, considering the ability of flexible controlling the electromagnetic waves and low-cost, an intelligent reconfigurable surface (IRS)-aided low-cost passive direction finding (LPDF) system is developed, where only one fully functional receiving channel is adopted. Then, the sparsity of targets direction in the spatial domain is exploited by formulating an atomic norm minimization (ANM) problem to estimate the DOA. Traditionally, solving ANM problem is complex and cannot be realized efficiently. Hence, a novel nonconvex-based ANM (NC-ANM) method is proposed by gradient threshold iteration, where a perturbation is introduced to avoid falling into saddle points. The theoretical analysis for the convergence of the NC-ANM method is also given. Moreover, the corresponding Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) in the LPDF system is derived, and taken as the referred bound of the DOA estimation. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the compared methods in the DOA estimation with lower computational complexity in the LPDF system.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Decision-Directed Hybrid RIS Channel Estimation with Minimal Pilot Overhead

To reap the benefits of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), channel state information (CSI) is generally required. However, CSI acquisition in RIS systems is challenging and often results in very large pilot overhead, especially in unstructured channel environments. Consequently, the RIS channel estimation problem has attracted a lot of interest and also been a subject of intense study in recent years. In this paper, we propose a decision-directed RIS channel estimation framework for general unstructured channel models. The employed RIS contains some hybrid elements that can simultaneously reflect and sense the incoming signal. We show that with the help of the hybrid RIS elements, it is possible to accurately recover the CSI with a pilot overhead proportional to the number of users. Therefore, the proposed framework substantially improves the system spectral efficiency compared to systems with passive RIS arrays since the pilot overhead in passive RIS systems is proportional to the number of RIS elements times the number of users. We also perform a detailed spectral efficiency analysis for both the pilot-directed and decision-directed frameworks. Our analysis takes into account both the channel estimation and data detection errors at both the RIS and the BS. Finally, we present numerous simulation results to verify the accuracy of the analysis as well as to show the benefits of the proposed decision-directed framework.Comment: submitted for journal publication, 13 pages, 7 figure

Low-Rank Channel Estimation for Millimeter Wave and Terahertz Hybrid MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the fundamental technologies for 5G and beyond. The increased number of antenna elements at both the transmitter and the receiver translates into a large-dimension channel matrix. In addition, the power requirements for the massive MIMO systems are high, especially when fully digital transceivers are deployed. To address this challenge, hybrid analog-digital transceivers are considered a viable alternative. However, for hybrid systems, the number of observations during each channel use is reduced. The high dimensions of the channel matrix and the reduced number of observations make the channel estimation task challenging. Thus, channel estimation may require increased training overhead and higher computational complexity. The need for high data rates is increasing rapidly, forcing a shift of wireless communication towards higher frequency bands such as millimeter Wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz). The wireless channel at these bands is comprised of only a few dominant paths. This makes the channel sparse in the angular domain and the resulting channel matrix has a low rank. This thesis aims to provide channel estimation solutions benefiting from the low rankness and sparse nature of the channel. The motivation behind this thesis is to offer a desirable trade-off between training overhead and computational complexity while providing a desirable estimate of the channel

Blind Goal-Oriented Massive Access for Future Wireless Networks

Emerging communication networks are envisioned to support massive wireless connectivity of heterogeneous devices with sporadic traffic and diverse requirements in terms of latency, reliability, and bandwidth. Providing multiple access to an increasing number of uncoordinated users and sharing the limited resources become essential in this context. In this work, we revisit the random access (RA) problem and exploit the continuous angular group sparsity feature of wireless channels to propose a novel RA strategy that provides low latency, high reliability, and massive access with limited bandwidth resources in an all-in-one package. To this end, we first design a reconstruction-free goal-oriented optimization problem, which only preserves the angular information required to identify the active devices. To solve this, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and derive closed-form expressions for each ADMM step. Then, we design a clustering algorithm that assigns the users in specific groups from which we can identify active stationary devices by their angles. For mobile devices, we propose an alternating minimization algorithm to recover their data and their channel gains simultaneously, which allows us to identify active mobile users. Simulation results show significant performance gains in terms of active user detection and false alarm probabilities as compared to state-of-the-art RA schemes, even with limited number of preambles. Moreover, unlike prior work, the performance of the proposed blind goal-oriented massive access does not depend on the number of devices

Interference Removal for Radar/Communication Co-existence: the Random Scattering Case

In this paper we consider an un-cooperative spectrum sharing scenario, wherein a radar system is to be overlaid to a pre-existing wireless communication system. Given the order of magnitude of the transmitted powers in play, we focus on the issue of interference mitigation at the communication receiver. We explicitly account for the reverberation produced by the (typically high-power) radar transmitter whose signal hits scattering centers (whether targets or clutter) producing interference onto the communication receiver, which is assumed to operate in an un-synchronized and un-coordinated scenario. We first show that receiver design amounts to solving a non-convex problem of joint interference removal and data demodulation: next, we introduce two algorithms, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block. The first algorithm is basically a relaxed constrained Atomic Norm minimization, while the latter relies on a two-stage processing structure and is based on alternating minimization. The merits of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations: interestingly, the two-stage alternating minimization algorithm turns out to achieve satisfactory performance with moderate computational complexity

Role of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in 6G Radio Localization: Recent Developments, Opportunities, Challenges, and Applications

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are seen as a key enabler low-cost and energy-efficient technology for 6G radio communication and localization. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on the RIS technology in radio localization for 6G. Particularly, we discuss the RIS-assisted radio localization taxonomy and review the studies of RIS-assisted radio localization for different network scenarios, bands of transmission, deployment environments, as well as near-field operations. Based on this review, we highlight the future research directions, associated technical challenges, real-world applications, and limitations of RIS-assisted radio localization