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Millimeter-Wave Wideband Channel Estimation Using Analog True-Time-Delay Array Under Hardware Impairments

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Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmW) systems require fast and accurate channel estimation to establish a high-rate directional link between the base station and user equipment. The majority of existing techniques often suffer from a high estimation overhead, especially when large antenna arrays based on phase shifters are used. For this reason, novel array architectures and signal processing techniques are needed to reduce the required overhead. Recently, the use of true-time-delay (TTD) arrays and their frequency-dependent beams was proposed for fast beam training in wideband mmW systems, but their application to low-overhead mmW channel estimation was not investigated. In this work, we address the channel estimation problem in a system where the base station has an analog phased array and the user is equipped with an analog TTD array that experiences hardware impairments. In particular, we propose a frequency-domain compressive sensing based algorithm that leverages frequency-dependent beams of the TTD array to reduce the estimation overhead. The proposed algorithm is compared with related state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the required number of training frames, estimation accuracy, computational complexity, and sensitivity to hardware impairments in antenna arrays. Further, we derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound for the estimators of the channel parameters in the presence of hardware impairments. We also propose a gradient descent based parameter refinement to improve the estimation accuracy of the proposed algorithm and remove the performance gap from the lower bound.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant 1955672. This work was also supported in part by the ComSenTer and CONIX Research Centers, two of six centers in JUMP, a Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) program sponsored by DARPA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Veljko Boljanovic & Danijela Cabric

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  1. Veljko Boljanovic
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  2. Danijela Cabric
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Contributions

Both authors contributed to the study conception and design. Algorithm development, formal analysis, numerical simulations, and writing of the first draft of the manuscript were performed by Veljko Boljanovic. Supervision and review and editing of the manuscript were done by Danijela Cabric. Both authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Veljko Boljanovic.

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Boljanovic, V., Cabric, D. Millimeter-Wave Wideband Channel Estimation Using Analog True-Time-Delay Array Under Hardware Impairments. J Sign Process Syst 94, 1015–1030 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-022-01771-6

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