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In this paper, we study the problem of joint active and passive beamforming for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted massive MIMO systems, where multiple IRSs equipped with a large number of passive elements are deployed to assist a base station (BS) to simultaneously serve a small number of single-antenna users in the same time-frequency resource. Our objective is to maximize the minimum signal to interference plus noise (SINR) at users by jointly optimizing the transmit precoding vector at the BS and phase shift parameters at IRSs. We show that an interesting automatic interference cancelation (AIC) property holds asymptotically as the number of passive elements approaches infinity, i.e., when an IRS is optimally tuned to serve a certain user, this IRS will become interference-free to other users. By utilizing this property, the max-min problem can be converted into an IRS-user association problem, where the objective is to determine which IRSs are assigned for each user. An exhaustive search scheme and a greedy search scheme are proposed to solve the IRS-user association problem. Our theoretical analysis reveals that our proposed solution attains an SINR that scales quadratically with the number of reflecting elements. Also, our theoretical result suggests that even with a moderate number of active antennas at the BS, a massive MIMO like gain can be achieved by increasing the number of passive reflecting elements, thus significantly reducing the energy consumption at the BS. Simulation results are provided to corroborate our theoretical results and to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has become an appealing solution for a wide range of commercial and civilian applications because of its high mobility and flexible deployment. Due to the continuous UAV navigation, the channel between UAV and base station (BS) is subject to the Doppler effect. Meanwhile, when the BS is equipped with massive number of antennas, the non-negligible propagation delay across the array aperture would cause beam squint effect. In this paper, we first investigate the channel of UAV communications under both Doppler shift effect and beam squint effect. Then, we design a gridless compressed sensing (GCS) based channel tracking method, where the high dimension uplink channel can be derived by estimating a few physical parameters such as the direction of arrival (DOA), Doppler shift, and the complex gain information. Besides, with the Doppler shift reciprocity and angular reciprocity, the downlink channel can be derived by only one pilot symbol, which greatly decreases the downlink channel training overhead. Various simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

In this paper, we present a novel framework of 3D scene based beam selection for mmWave communications that relies only on the environmental data and deep learning techniques. Different from other out-of-band side-information aided communication strategies, the proposed one fully utilizes the environmental information, e.g., the shape, the position, and even the materials of the surrounding buildings/cars/trees that are obtained from 3D scene reconstruction. Specifically, we build the neural networks with the input as point cloud of the 3D scene and the output as the beam indices. Compared with the LIDAR aided technique, the reconstructed 3D scene here is achieved from multiple images taken offline from cameras and thus significantly lowers down the cost and makes itself applicable for small mobile terminals. Simulation results show that the proposed 3D scene based beam selection can outperform the LIDAR method in terms of accuracy., Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures

Source number detection is a critical problem in array signal processing. Conventional model-driven methods e.g., Akaikes information criterion (AIC) and minimum description length (MDL), suffer from severe performance degradation when the number of snapshots is small or the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. In this paper, we exploit the model-aided based deep neural network (DNN) to estimate the source number. Specifically, we first propose the eigenvalue based regression network (ERNet) and classification network (ECNet) to estimate the number of non-coherent sources, where the eigenvalues of the received signal covariance matrix and the source number are used as the input and the supervise label of the networks, respectively. Then, we extend the ERNet and ECNet for estimating the number of coherent sources, where the forward-backward spatial smoothing (FBSS) scheme is adopted to improve the performance of ERNet and ECNet. Numerical results demonstrate the outstanding performance of ERNet and ECNet over the conventional AIC and MDL methods as well as their excellent generalization capability, which also shows their great potentials for practical applications.

We develop a direction of arrival (DoA) and channel estimation algorithm for the one-bit quantized millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. By formulating the estimation problem as a noisy one-bit compressed sensing problem, we propose a computationally efficient gridless solution based on the expectation-maximization generalized approximate message passing (EMGAMP) approach. The proposed algorithm does not need the prior knowledge about the number of DoAs and outperforms the existing methods in distinguishing extremely close DoAs for the case of one-bit quantization. Both the DoAs and the channel coefficients are estimated for the case of one-bit quantization. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has effective estimation performances when the DoAs are very close to each other., Comment: Already accepted for publication by IEEE Globecom 2019 but not published yet

In a frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the acquisition of downlink channel state information (CSI) at base station (BS) is a very challenging task due to the overwhelming overheads required for downlink training and uplink feedback. In this paper, we reveal a deterministic uplink-to-downlink mapping function when the position-to-channel mapping is bijective. Motivated by the universal approximation theorem, we then propose a sparse complex-valued neural network (SCNet) to approximate the uplink-to-downlink mapping function. Different from general deep networks that operate in the real domain, the SCNet is constructed in the complex domain and is able to learn the complex-valued mapping function by off-line training. After training, the SCNet is used to directly predict the downlink CSI based on the estimated uplink CSI without the need of either downlink training or uplink feedback. Numerical results show that the SCNet achieves better performance than general deep networks in terms of prediction accuracy and exhibits remarkable robustness over complicated wireless channels, demonstrating its great potential for practical deployments.

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 departure (AoD), multi-path delay, Doppler shift, etc. As a consequence, transceiver techniques like synchronization, channel estimation, beamforming, precoding, multi-user access, etc., can be re-shaped with these physical parameters, as opposed to those designed directly with channel state information (CSI). Interestingly, parameters like AoA/AoD and multi-path delay are frequency insensitive and thus can be used to guide the down-link transmission from uplink training even for FDD systems. Moreover, some phenomena of massive MIMO that were vaguely revealed previously can be better explained now with array signal processing, e.g., the beam squint effect. In all, the target of this paper is to present an overview of recent progress on merging array signal processing into massive MIMO communications as well as its promising future directions.

This paper proposes a Bayesian downlink channel estimation algorithm for time-varying massive MIMO networks. In particular, the quantization effects at the receiver are considered. In order to fully exploit the sparsity and time correlations of channels, we formulate the time-varying massive MIMO channel as the simultaneously sparse signal model. Then, we propose a sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework to learn the model parameters of the sparse virtual channel. To reduce complexity, we employ the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to achieve the approximated solution. Specifically, the factor graph and the general approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithms are used to compute the desired posterior statistics in the expectation step, so that high-dimensional integrals over the marginal distributions can be avoided. The non-zero supporting vector of a virtual channel is then obtained from channel statistics by a k-means clustering algorithm. After that, the reduced dimensional GAMP based scheme is applied to make the full use of the channel temporal correlation so as to enhance the virtual channel tracking accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed schemes through simulations., Comment: 30 Pages, 11 figures

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 perspective, resulting in a model which sheds light on the angle-delay sparsity of mmWave transmission. We next design a compressive sensing based channel estimation algorithm which utilizes the shift-invariant block-sparsity of this channel model. The proposed algorithm jointly computes the off-grid angles, the off-grid delays, and the complex gains of the multi-path channel. We show that the newly proposed scheme reflects the mmWave channel more accurately and results in improved performance compared to traditional approaches. We then demonstrate how this approach can be applied to recover both the uplink as well as the downlink channel in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems, by exploiting the angle-delay reciprocity of mmWave channels.

With the increasing scale of antenna arrays in wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, the physical propagation delays of electromagnetic waves traveling across the whole array will become large and comparable to the time-domain sample period, which is known as the spatial-wideband effect. In this case, different subcarriers in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system will "see" distinct angles of arrival (AoAs) for the same path. This effect is known as beam squint, resulting from the spatial-wideband effect, and makes the approaches based on the conventional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) model, such as channel estimation and precoding, inapplicable. After discussing the relationship between beam squint and the spatial-wideband effect, we propose a channel estimation scheme for frequency-division duplex (FDD) mmWave massive MIMO-OFDM systems with hybrid analog/digital precoding, which takes the beam squint effect into consideration. A super-resolution compressed sensing approach is developed to extract the frequency-insensitive parameters of each uplink channel path, i.e., the AoA and the time delay, and the frequency-sensitive parameter, i.e., the complex channel gain. With the help of the reciprocity of these frequency-insensitive parameters in FDD systems, the downlink channel estimation can be greatly simplified, where only limited pilots are needed to obtain downlink complex gains and reconstruct downlink channels. Furthermore, the uplink and downlink channel covariance matrices can be constructed from these frequency-insensitive channel parameters rather than through a long-term average, which enables the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) channel estimation to further enhance performance. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over the conventional methods in mmWave communications.

Frequency hopping (FH) is an effective anti-jamming technology in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). However, it is difficult to significantly increase the anti-jamming results because of the growing crowded spectrum in wireless communications. Orbital momentum angular (OAM) provides a new mode dimension for anti-jamming without consuming extra power and frequency resources in CRNs. In this paper, we propose the mode-frequency hopping (MFH) scheme, which jointly uses the mode hopping and the traditional FH scheme for anti-jamming to significantly increase the capacity of secondary users (SUs). We derive the false alarm probability and transmission outage probability for CRNs under our proposed MFH scheme. Then, based on the two derived probabilities, we calculate the capacity of SUs under the MFH scheme. Numerical results show that our developed MFH scheme can achieve better anti-jamming results as compared with the traditional FH scheme in CRNs.

This paper considers channel estimation and uplink achievable rate of the coarsely quantized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with radio frequency (RF) impairments. We utilize additive quantization noise model (AQNM) and extended error vector magnitude (EEVM) model to analyze the impacts of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and RF impairments respectively. We show that hardware impairments cause a nonzero floor on the channel estimation error, which contraries to the conventional case with ideal hardware. The maximal-ratio combining (MRC) technique is then used at the receiver, and an approximate tractable expression for the uplink achievable rate is derived. The simulation results illustrate the appreciable compensations between ADCs' resolution and RF impairments. The proposed studies support the feasibility of equipping economical coarse ADCs and economical imperfect RF components in practical massive MIMO systems., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to IEEE Communications Letters. Already accepted for publication by IEEE but not published yet

In this letter, we study the ambient backscatter communication systems over frequency-selective channels. Specifically, we propose an interference-free transceiver design to facilitate signal detection at the reader. Our design utilizes the cyclic prefix (CP) of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) source symbols, which can cancel the signal interference and thus enhance the detection accuracy at the reader. Meanwhile, our design results in no interference on the existing OFDM communication systems. We also suggest a maximum likelihood (ML) detector for the reader and derive two detection thresholds. Simulations are then provided to corroborate our proposed studies., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1901.00368

Although millimeter wave (mmWave) systems promise to offer larger bandwidth and unprecedented peak data rates, their practical implementation faces several hardware challenges compared to sub-6 GHz communication systems. These hardware constraints can seriously undermine the performance and deployment progress of mmWave systems and, thus, necessitate disruptive solutions in the cross-design of analog and digital modules. In this article, we discuss the importance of different hardware constraints and propose a novel system architecture, which is able to release these hardware constraints while achieving better performance for future millimeter wave communication systems. The characteristics of the proposed architecture are articulated in detail, and a representative example is provided to demonstrate its validity and efficacy., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazine

In this paper, we develop a novel angle-domain adaptive filtering (ADAF)-based frequency synchronization method for the uplink of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiuser network, which is applicable for users with either separate or overlapped angle-of-arrival (AoA) regions. For each user, we first introduce the angle-constraining matrix (ACM), which consists of a set of selected match-filter (MF) beamformers pointing to the AoAs of the interested user. Then, the adaptive beamformer can be acquired by appropriately designing the ADAF vectors. Such beamformer can achieve two-stage adaptive multiuser interference (MUI) suppression, i.e., inherently suppressing the MUI from non-overlapping users by ACM in the first stage and substantially mitigating the MUI from adjacent overlapping users by ADAF vector in the second stage. For both separate and mutually overlapping users, the carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation and subsequent data detection can be performed independently for each user, which significantly reduces computational complexity. Moreover, ADAF is rather robust to imperfect AoA knowledge and side cluster of scatterers, making itself promising for multiuser uplink transmission. We also analyze the performance of CFO estimation and obtain an approximated closed-form expression of mean-squared error (MSE). The effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over the existing methods are demonstrated by numerical results., Comment: 14 pages (double columns), 7 figures

Intelligent communication is gradually considered as the mainstream direction in future wireless communications. As a major branch of machine learning, deep learning (DL) has been applied in physical layer communications and has demonstrated an impressive performance improvement in recent years. However, most of the existing works related to DL focus on data-driven approaches, which consider the communication system as a black box and train it by using a huge volume of data. Training a network requires sufficient computing resources and extensive time, both of which are rarely found in communication devices. By contrast, model-driven DL approaches combine communication domain knowledge with DL to reduce the demand for computing resources and training time. This article reviews the recent advancements in the application of model-driven DL approaches in physical layer communications, including transmission scheme, receiver design, and channel information recovery. Several open issues for further research are also highlighted after presenting the comprehensive survey., Comment: 20 pages,6 figures

In this paper, we consider a downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system from a base station to a high-speed train (HST) equipped with fully/partly calibrated massive uniform linear antenna-array (ULA) in wireless environments with abundant scatterers. Multiple Doppler frequency offsets (DFOs) stemming from intensive propagation paths together with transceiver oscillator frequency offset (OFO) result in a fast time-varying frequency-selective channel. We develop an angle domain carrier frequency offset (CFO, general designation for DFO and OFO) estimation approach. A high-resolution beamforming network is designed to separate different DFOs into a set of parallel branches in angle domain such that each branch is mainly affected by a single dominant DFO. Then, a joint estimation algorithm for both maximum DFO and OFO is developed for fully calibrated ULA. Next, its estimation mean square error (MSE) performance is analyzed under inter-subarray mismatches. To mitigate the detrimental effects of inter-subarray mismatches, we introduce a calibration-oriented beamforming parameter (COBP) and develop the corresponding modified joint estimation algorithm for partly calibrated ULA. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound of CFO estimation is derived. Both theoretical and numerical results are provided to corroborate the proposed method., Comment: Single columns, 32 pages, 12 figures, transactions paper

Communications in high-mobility environments have caught a lot of attentions recently. In this paper, fast time-varying channels for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are addressed. We derive the exact channel power spectrum density (PSD) for the uplink from a high-speed railway (HSR) to a base station (BS) and propose to further reduce the channel time variation via beamforming network optimization. A large-scale uniform linear array (ULA) is equipped at the HSR to separate multiple Doppler shifts in angle domain through high-resolution transmit beamforming. Each branch comprises a dominant Doppler shift, which can be compensated to suppress the channel time variation, and we derive the channel PSD and the Doppler spread to assess the residual channel time variation. Interestingly, the channel PSD can be exactly expressed as the product of a pattern function and a beam-distortion function. The former reflects the impact of array aperture and is the converted radiation pattern of ULA, while the latter depends on the configuration of beamforming directions. Inspired by the PSD analysis, we introduce a common configurable amplitudes and phases (CCAP) parameter to optimize the beamforming network, by partly removing the constant modulus quantized phase constraints of matched filter (MF) beamformers. In this way, the residual Doppler shifts can be ulteriorly suppressed, further reducing the residual channel time variation. The optimal CCAP parameter minimizing the Doppler spread is derived in a closed form. Numerical results are provided to corroborate both the channel PSD analysis and the superiority of beamforming network optimization technique., Comment: Double columns, 13 pages, 10 figures, transactions paper

In this paper, we apply angle-domain Doppler compensation for high-mobility wideband massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) uplink transmission. The time-varying multipath channel is considered between high-speed terminal and static base station (BS), where multiple Doppler frequency offsets (DFOs) are associated with distinct angle of departures (AoDs). With the aid of the large-scale uniform linear array (ULA) at the transmitter, we design a beamforming network to generate multiple parallel beamforming branches, each transmitting signal pointing to one particular angle. Then, the transmitted signal in each branch will experience only one dominant DFO when passing over the time-varying channel, which can be easily compensated before transmission starts. We theoretically analyze the Doppler spread of the equivalent uplink channel after angle-domain Doppler compensation, which takes into account both the mainlobe and sidelobes of the transmit beam in each branch. It is seen that the channel time-variation can be effectively suppressed if the number of transmit antennas is sufficiently large. Interestingly, the asymptotic scaling law of channel variation is obtained, which shows that the Doppler spread is proportional to the maximum DFO and decreases approximately as $1/\sqrt{M}$ ($M$ is the number of transmit antennas) when $M$ is sufficiently large. Numerical results are provided to corroborate the proposed scheme., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1704.04725

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (M-MIMO) is an enabling technology of 5G wireless communication. The performance of an M-MIMO system is highly dependent on the speed and accuracy of obtaining the channel state information (CSI). The computational complexity of channel estimation for an M-MIMO system can be reduced by making use of the sparsity of the M-MIMO channel. In this paper, we propose the hardware-efficient channel estimator based on angle-division multiple access (ADMA) for the first time. Preamble, uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) training are also implemented. For further hardware-efficiency consideration, optimization regarding quantization and approximation strategies have been discussed. Implementation techniques such as pipelining and systolic processing are also employed for hardware regularity. Numerical results and FPGA implementation have demonstrated the advantages of the proposed channel estimator.

In this paper, we propose a channel tracking method for massive multi-input and multi-output systems under both time-varying and spatial-varying circumstance. Exploiting the characteristics of massive antenna array, a spatial-temporal basis expansion model is designed to reduce the effective dimensions of up-link and down-link channel, which decomposes channel state information into the time-varying spatial information and gain information. We firstly model the users movements as a one-order unknown Markov process, which is blindly learned by the expectation and maximization (EM) approach. Then, the up-link time varying spatial information can be blindly tracked by Taylor series expansion of the steering vector, while the rest up-link channel gain information can be trained by only a few pilot symbols. Due to angle reciprocity (spatial reciprocity), the spatial information of the down-link channel can be immediately obtained from the up-link counterpart, which greatly reduces the complexity of down-link channel tracking. Various numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

By means of network densification, ultra dense networks (UDNs) can efficiently broaden the network coverage and enhance the system throughput. In parallel, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications and networking have attracted increasing attention recently due to their high agility and numerous applications. In this article, we present a vision of UAV-supported UDNs. Firstly, we present four representative scenarios to show the broad applications of UAV-supported UDNs in communications, caching and energy transfer. Then, we highlight the efficient power control in UAV-supported UDNs by discussing the main design considerations and methods in a comprehensive manner. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance superiority of UAV-supported UDNs via case study simulations, compared to traditional fixed infrastructure based networks. In addition, we discuss the dominating technical challenges and open issues ahead.

In this paper, we design robust beamforming to guarantee the physical layer security for a multiuser beam division multiple access (BDMA) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, when the channel estimation errors are taken into consideration. With the aid of artificial noise (AN), the proposed design are formulated as minimizing the transmit power of the base station (BS), while providing legal users and the eavesdropper (Eve) with different signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). It is strictly proved that, under BDMA massive MIMO scheme, the initial non-convex optimization can be equivalently converted to a convex semi-definite programming (SDP) problem and the optimal rank-one beamforming solutions can be guaranteed. In stead of directly resorting to the convex tool, we make one step further by deriving the optimal beamforming direction and the optimal beamforming power allocation in closed-form, which greatly reduces the computational complexity and makes the proposed design practical for real world applications. Simulation results are then provided to verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

Machine learning (ML) has been widely applied to the upper layers of wireless communication systems for various purposes, such as deployment of cognitive radio and communication network. However, its application to the physical layer is hampered by sophisticated channel environments and limited learning ability of conventional ML algorithms. Deep learning (DL) has been recently applied for many fields, such as computer vision and natural language processing, given its expressive capacity and convenient optimization capability. The potential application of DL to the physical layer has also been increasingly recognized because of the new features for future communications, such as complex scenarios with unknown channel models, high speed and accurate processing requirements; these features challenge conventional communication theories. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the emerging studies on DL-based physical layer processing, including leveraging DL to redesign a module of the conventional communication system (for modulation recognition, channel decoding, and detection) and replace the communication system with a radically new architecture based on an autoencoder. These DL-based methods show promising performance improvements but have certain limitations, such as lack of solid analytical tools and use of architectures that are specifically designed for communication and implementation research, thereby motivating future research in this field., Comment: Accepted by China Communications 14 pages, 19 figures

In this paper, we propose a new channel estimation scheme for TDD/FDD massive MIMO systems by reconstructing uplink/downlink channel covariance matrices (CCMs) with the aid of array signal processing techniques. Specifically, the angle information and power angular spectrum (PAS) of each multi-path channel is extracted from the instantaneous uplink channel state information (CSI). Then, the uplink CCM is reconstructed and can be used to improve the uplink channel estimation without any additional training cost. In virtue of angle reciprocity as well as PAS reciprocity between uplink and downlink channels, the downlink CCM could also be inferred with a similar approach even for FDD massive MIMO systems. Then, the downlink instantaneous CSI can be obtained by training towards the dominant eigen-directions of each user. The proposed strategy is applicable for any kind of PAS distributions and array geometries. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods over the existing ones., Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-satellite communication has drawn dramatic attention for its potential to build the integrated space-air-ground network and the seamless wide-area coverage. The key challenge to UAV-satellite communication is its unstable beam pointing due to the UAV navigation, which is a typical SatCom on-the-move scenario. In this paper, we propose a blind beam tracking approach for Ka-band UAVsatellite communication system, where UAV is equipped with a large-scale antenna array. The effects of UAV navigation are firstly released through the mechanical adjustment, which could approximately point the beam towards the target satellite through beam stabilization and dynamic isolation. Specially, the attitude information can be realtimely derived from data fusion of lowcost sensors. Then, the precision of the beam pointing is blindly refined through electrically adjusting the weight of the massive antennas, where an array structure based simultaneous perturbation algorithm is designed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing ones.

When there are a large number of antennas in massive MIMO systems, the transmitted wideband signal will be sensitive to the physical propagation delay of electromagnetic waves across the large array aperture, which is called the spatial-wideband effect. In this scenario, transceiver design is different from most of the existing works, which presume that the bandwidth of the transmitted signals is not that wide, ignore the spatial-wideband effect, and only address the frequency selectivity. In this paper, we investigate spatial- and frequency-wideband effects, called dual-wideband effects, in massive MIMO systems from array signal processing point of view. Taking mmWave-band communications as an example, we describe the transmission process to address the dual-wideband effects. By exploiting the channel sparsity in the angle domain and the delay domain, we develop the efficient uplink and downlink channel estimation strategies that require much less amount of training overhead and cause no pilot contamination. Thanks to the array signal processing techniques, the proposed channel estimation is suitable for both TDD and FDD massive MIMO systems. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed transmission design for massive MIMO systems can effectively deal with the dual-wideband effects., Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Index terms: Massive MIMO, mmWave, array signal processing, wideband, spatial-wideband, beam squint, angle reciprocity, delay reciprocity. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing

This paper considers the beamspace channel estimation problem in 3D lens antenna array under a millimeter-wave communication system. We analyze the focusing capability of the 3D lens antenna array and the sparsity of the beamspace channel response matrix. Considering the analysis, we observe that the channel matrix can be treated as a 2D natural image; that is, the channel is sparse, and the changes between adjacent elements are subtle. Thus, for the channel estimation, we incorporate an image reconstruction technique called sparse non-informative parameter estimator-based cosparse analysis AMP for imaging (SCAMPI) algorithm. The SCAMPI algorithm is faster and more accurate than earlier algorithms such as orthogonal matching pursuit and support detection algorithms. To further improve the SCAMPI algorithm, we model the channel distribution as a generic Gaussian mixture (GM) probability and embed the expectation maximization learning algorithm into the SCAMPI algorithm to learn the parameters in the GM probability. We show that the GM probability outperforms the common uniform distribution used in image reconstruction. We also propose a phase-shifter-reduced selection network structure to decrease the power consumption of the system and prove that the SCAMPI algorithm is robust even if the number of phase shifters is reduced by 10%.

In this paper, we propose a Doppler pre-compensation scheme for high-mobility orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) uplink, where a high-speed terminal transmits signals to the base station (BS). Considering that the time-varying multipath channel consists of multiple Doppler frequency offsets (DFOs) with different angle of departures (AoDs), we propose to perform DFO pre-compensation at the transmitter with a large-scale uniform linear array (ULA). The transmitted signal passes through a beamforming network with high-spatial resolution to produce multiple parallel branches. Each branch transmits signal towards one direction thus it is affected by one dominant DFO when passing over the time-varying channel. Therefore, we can compensate the DFO for each branch at the transmitter previously. Theoretical analysis for the Doppler spread of the equivalent uplink channel is also conducted. It is found that when the number of transmit antennas is sufficiently large, the time-variation of channel can be efficiently suppressed. Therefore, the performance will not degrade significantly if applying the conventional time-invariant channel estimation and equalization methods at the receiver. Simulation results are provided to verify the proposed scheme., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1701.03221

We propose a novel fifth-generation (5G) rapid prototyping (RaPro) system architecture by combining FPGA-privileged modules from a software defined radio (or FPGA-coprocessor) and high-level programming language for advanced algorithms from multi-core general purpose processors. The proposed system architecture exhibits excellent flexibility and scalability in the development of a 5G prototyping system. As a proof of concept, a multi-user full-dimension multiple-input and multiple-output system is established based on the proposed architecture. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed architecture in large-scale antenna and wideband communication systems., Comment: accepted by IEEE Wireless Communication Letters

In this paper, we consider the Physical Layer Security(PLS) problem in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based dual-hop system which consists of multiple users, multiple amplify and forward relays, and an eavesdropper. The aim is to enhance PLS of the entire system by maximizing sum secrecy rate of secret users through optimal resource allocation under various practical constraints. Specifically, the sub-carrier allocation to different users, the relay assignments, and the power loading over different sub-carriers at transmitting nodes are optimized. The joint optimization problem is modeled as a mixed binary integer programming problem subject to exclusive sub-carrier allocation and separate power budget constraints at each node. A joint optimization solution is obtained through Lagrangian dual decomposition where KKT conditions are exploited to find the optimal power allocation at base station. Further, to reduce the complexity, a sub-optimal scheme is presented where the optimal power allocation is derived under fixed sub-carrier-relay assignment. Simulation results are also provided to validate the performance of proposed schemes.

In this paper, we propose a frequency synchronization scheme for multiuser orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) uplink with a large-scale uniform linear array (ULA) at base station (BS) by exploiting the angle information of users. Considering that the incident signal at BS from each user can be restricted within a certain angular spread, the proposed scheme could perform carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation for each user individually through a \textit{joint spatial-frequency alignment} procedure and can be completed efficiently with the aided of fast Fourier transform (FFT). A multi-branch receive beamforming is further designed to yield an equivalent single user transmission model for which the conventional single-user channel estimation and data detection can be carried out. To make the study complete, the theoretical performance analysis of the CFO estimation is also conducted. We further develop a user grouping scheme to deal with the unexpected scenarios that some users may not be separated well from the spatial domain. Finally, various numerical results are provided to verify the proposed studies.

This paper presents a new view of multi-user (MU) hybrid massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems from array signal processing perspective. We first show that the instantaneous channel vectors corresponding to different users are asymptotically orthogonal if the angles of arrival (AOAs) of users are different. We then decompose the channel matrix into an angle domain basis matrix and a gain matrix. The former can be formulated by steering vectors and the latter has the same size as the number of RF chains, which perfectly matches the structure of hybrid precoding. A novel hybrid channel estimation is proposed by separately estimating the angle information and the gain matrix, which could significantly save the training overhead and substantially improve the channel estimation accuracy compared to the conventional beamspace approach. Moreover, with the aid of the angle domain matrix, the MU massive MIMO system can be viewed as a type of non-orthogonal angle division multiple access (ADMA) to simultaneously serve multiple users at the same frequency band. Finally, the performance of the proposed scheme is validated by computer simulation results.

In this correspondence, we propose a new receiver design for high-mobility orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) downlink transmissions with a large-scale antenna array. The downlink signal experiences the challenging fast time-varying propagation channel. The time-varying nature originates from the multiple carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) due to the transceiver oscillator frequency offset (OFO) and multiple Doppler shifts. Let the received signal first go through a carefully designed beamforming network, which could separate multiple CFOs in the spatial domain with sufficient number of receive antennas. A joint estimation method for the Doppler shifts and the OFO is further developed. Then the conventional single-CFO compensation and channel estimation method can be carried out for each beamforming branch. The proposed receiver design avoids the complicated time-varying channel estimation, which differs a lot from the conventional methods. More importantly, the proposed scheme can be applied to the commonly used time-varying channel models, such as the Jakes' channel model.

We study a novel communication mechanism, ambient backscatter, that utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted from an ambient source as both energy supply and information carrier to enable communications between low-power devices. Different from existing non-coherent schemes, we here design the semi-coherent detection, where channel parameters can be obtained from unknown data symbols and a few pilot symbols. We first derive the optimal detector for the complex Gaussian ambient RF signal from likelihood ratio test and compute the corresponding closed-form bit error rate (BER). To release the requirement for prior knowledge of the ambient RF signal, we next design a suboptimal energy detector with ambient RF signals being either the complex Gaussian or the phase shift keying (PSK). The corresponding detection thresholds, the analytical BER, and the outage probability are also obtained in closed-form. Interestingly, the complex Gaussian source would cause an error floor while the PSK source does not, which brings nontrivial indication of constellation design as opposed to the popular Gaussian-embedded literatures. Simulations are provided to corroborate the theoretical studies., Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures

This paper proposes a new channel estimation scheme for the multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in time-varying environment. We introduce a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) aided spatial-temporal basis expansion model (ST-BEM) to reduce the effective dimensions of uplink/downlink channels, such that training overhead and feedback cost could be greatly decreased. The newly proposed ST-BEM is suitable for both time division duplex (TDD) systems and frequency division duplex (FDD) systems thanks to the angle reciprocity, and can be efficiently deployed by fast Fourier transform (FFT). Various numerical results have corroborated the proposed studies., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted by IEEE GLOBECOM2016