The THz band (0.1-10 THz) has attracted considerable attention for next-generation wireless communications due to the large amount of available bandwidth that may be key to meet the rapidly increasing data rate requirements. Before deploying a system in this band, a detailed wireless channel analysis is required as the basis for proper design and testing of system implementations. One of the most important deployment scenarios of this band is the outdoor microcellular environment, where the Transmitter (Tx) and the Receiver (Rx) have a significant height difference (typically ≥ 10 m). In this paper, we present double-directional (i.e., directionally resolved at both link ends) channel measurements in such a microcellular scenario encompassing street canyons and an open square. Measurements are done for a 1 GHz bandwidth between 145-146 GHz and an antenna beamwidth of 13 degree; distances between Tx and Rx are up to 85 m and the Tx is at a height of 11.5 m from the ground. The measurements are analyzed to estimate path loss, shadowing, delay spread, angular spread, and multipath component (MPC) power distribution. These results allow the development of more realistic and detailed THz system performance assessment.

Condensed channel parameters, such as Root Mean Square (RMS) delay spread and angular spread, are essential ways of representing results from the measurement of wireless propagation channels. However, real-world measurements are invariably affected by noise, which is not inherently reduced by the Fourier processing - in contrast to high-resolution parameter estimation. Even when the signal-to-noise ratio is relatively high, e.g., 20 dB, the impact of the noise on the condensed parameters can be significant and lead to erroneous estimates. This can be explained, e.g., for the computation of the RMS delay spread, where long delays (which often carry noise only) are "up-weighted" by the square of the delay. While techniques like noise thresholding are often applied, the reasons for choosing thresholds are usually not described in detail. This paper systematically analyzes noise thresholding for joint delay-angle measurements and derives equations for the impact of thresholds on the computation of delay and angle RMS spreads and window parameters under various measurement circumstances. The paper provides results based on closed-form equations, as well as MonteCarlo (MC) simulations, and application to real-world measurements in the sub-THz band.

The availability of large bandwidths in the terahertz (THz) band will be a crucial enabler of high data rate applications in next-generation wireless communication systems. The urban microcellular scenario is an essential deployment scenario where the base station (BS) is significantly higher than the user equipment (UE). Under practical operating conditions, moving objects (i.e., blockers) can intermittently obstruct various parts of the BS- UE link. Therefore, in the current paper, we analyze the effect of such blockers. We assume a blockage of the strongest beam pair and investigate the availability and extent of angular diversity, i.e., alternative beampairs that can sustain communication when the strongest is blocked. The analysis uses double-directional channel measurements in urban microcellular scenarios for 145– 146 GHz with BS-UE distances between 18 to 83 m. We relate the communication-system quantities of beam diversity and capacity to the wireless propagation conditions. We show that the SNR loss due to blockage depends on the blocked angular range and the specific location, and we find mean blockage loss to be on the order of 10–20 dB in line-of-sight (LOS) and 5–12 dB in NLOS (non-LOS). This analysis can contribute to the design of intelligent algorithms or devices (e.g., beamforming, intelligent reflective surfaces) to overcome the impact of the blockage.

This paper discusses a new 5G-Advanced duplex scheme called sub-band full-duplex (SBFD) and the details of implementing it for 5G TDD spectrum. The SBFD requires an advanced self interference cancellation (SIC) which is designed to handle extremely high level of cross link interference. Novel SIC techniques were designed for base stations (BSs) operating on 3.4 GHz with massive MIMO and on 26 GHz with multi-beam capability. By utilizing electromagnetic walls in conjunction with electromagnetic bandgap, an extremely high level of isolation between transmit and receive antennas is achieved. Residual interference is further removed using fractional nonlinear interference estimation in baseband. Two Proofs-of-Concepts (PoCs) have been implemented for feasibility verification. The first PoC was for a massive MIMO BS operating with 32 cross polarized antenna ports on 3.4 GHz and a bandwidth of 100 MHz. The second PoC was for a multi-beam BS with 256 antenna elements operating on 26 GHz and a bandwidth of 400 MHz. It was observed that the self-interference in SBFD can be suppressed in real time to a level of less than 0.7 dB over the RX noise floor for both 3.4 GHz and 26 GHz in an outdoor environment.

THz band is envisioned to be used in 6G systems to meet the ever-increasing demand for data rate. However, before an eventual system design and deployment can proceed, detailed channel sounding measurements are required to understand key channel characteristics. In this paper, we present a first extensive set of channel measurements for urban outdoor environments that are ultra-wideband, and double-directional where both transmitter and receiver are at the same height. In all, we present measurements at 38 locations, consisting of nearly 50,000 impulse responses, representing both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) cases in the 1-100 m range between 145-146 GHz. We provide modeling for path loss, shadowing, delay spread, angular spread, multipath component (MPC) power distribution and Qtapnumber. We find, among other things, that outdoor communication over tens of meters is feasible in this frequency range even in NLoS scenarios, that omni-directional delay spreads of up to 100 ns, and directional delay spreads of up to 10 ns are observed, while angular spreads are also quite significant, and a surprisingly large number of MPCs are observed for 1 GHz bandwidth and 13° beamwidth. These results constitute an important first step towards better understanding the wireless channel in the THz band.

THz communication has attracted a great deal of attention due to the large bandwidth available in this band. However, system development and deployment requires detailed knowledge of the wireless channel, which must be provided by measurements (channel sounding) and subsequent modeling in key scenarios of interest. One important scenario in this regard is the urban outdoor microcellular scenario where the Transmitter (Tx) and the Receiver (Rx) have a significant height difference. In this paper, we present ultra-wideband double-directional channel measurements in a microcellular scenario for the band between 145-146 GHz in a street canyon with Tx-Rx of distances up to 67 m. The results are analyzed in the delay and angular domain, and the impact of the street canyon on the power delay profiles and angular power spectra is detailed. These measurements thus contribute towards the creation of a more realistic and detailed THz channel model in these scenarios.

Wireless communications in the THz frequency range can allow data rates of hundreds of Gbit/s, and will thus be an important part of 6G. A first important step for system design is an understanding of the underlying propagation channel. In this paper, we present results from one of the first measurement campaigns for medium-distance (up to 35 m) outdoor channels in urban environments where both the directions and delays of multipath are measured with good resolution. The results show a surprisingly rich multipath environment, leading to significant dispersion in both delay and angular domains. We also find that metallic-covered surfaces lead to a considerable enhancement of multipath, which indicates an important impact of building materials. Overall, the results indicate that relying on pronounced sparsity for THz system design might not always be valid in this type of environment.

In this paper, we develop a new capacity-approaching code, namely, parallel-concatenated (PC)-Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) convolutional code that is based on the parallel concatenation of trellis-based quasi-cyclic LDPC (TQC-LDPC) convolutional codes. The proposed PC-LDPC convolutional code can be derived from any QC-LDPC block code by introducing the trellis-based convolutional dependency to the code. The capacity-approaching PC-LDPC convolutional codes are encoded through parallel concatenated trellis-based QC recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) encoder (namely, QC-RSC encoder) that is also proposed in this paper. The proposed PC-LDPC convolutional code and the associated encoder retain a fine input granularity on the order of the lifting factor of the underlying block code. We also describe the corresponding trellis-based QC maximum a posteriori probability (namely, QC-MAP) decoder that efficiently decodes the PC-LDPC convolutional code. Performance and hardware implementation results show that the PC-LDPC convolutional codes with the QC-MAP decoder have two times lower complexity for a given bit-error-rate (BER), signal-to-noise ratio, and data rate, than conventional QC-LDPC block codes and LDPC convolutional codes. Moreover, the PC-LDPC convolutional code with the QC-MAP decoder outperforms the conventional QC-LDPC block codes by more than 0.5 dB for a given BER, complexity, and data rate and approaches Shannon capacity limit with a gap smaller than 1.25 dB. This low decoding complexity and the fine granularity make it feasible to efficiently implement the proposed capacity-approaching PC-LDPC convolutional code and the associated trellis-based QC-MAP decoder in next generation ultra-high data rate mobile systems.

Hybrid analog/digital architectures and receivers with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are two low power solutions for wireless systems with large antenna arrays, such as millimeter wave and massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. Most prior work represents two extreme cases in which either a small number of radio frequency (RF) chains with full-resolution ADCs, or low-resolution ADC with a number of RF chains equal to the number of antennas is assumed. In this paper, a generalized hybrid architecture with a small number of RF chains and a finite number of ADC bits is proposed. For this architecture, achievable rates with channel inversion and singular value decomposition-based transmission methods are derived. Results show that the achievable rate is comparable to that obtained by full-precision ADC receivers at low and medium SNRs. A trade-off between the achievable rate and power consumption for the different numbers of bits and RF chains is devised. This enables us to draw some conclusions on the number of ADC bits needed to maximize the system energy efficiency. Numerical simulations show that coarse ADC quantization is optimal under various system configurations. This means that hybrid combining with coarse quantization achieves better energy-rate trade-off compared with both hybrid combining with full-resolutions ADCs and 1-bit ADC combining.

Data security has always been a major concern and a huge challenge for governments and individuals throughout the world since early times. Recent advances in technology, such as the introduction of cloud computing, make it even a bigger challenge to keep data secure. In parallel, high throughput mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are designed to support these new technologies. The high throughput requires power-efficient designs to maintain the battery-life. In this paper, we propose a novel Joint Security and Advanced Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) Coding (JSALC) method. The JSALC is composed of two parts: the Joint Security and Advanced LDPC-based Encryption (JSALE) and the dual-step Secure LDPC code for Channel Coding (SLCC). The JSALE is obtained by interlacing Advanced Encryption System (AES)-like rounds and Quasi-Cyclic (QC)-LDPC rows into a single primitive. Both the JSALE code and the SLCC code share the same base quasi-cyclic parity check matrix (PCM) which retains the power efficiency compared to conventional systems. We show that the overall JSALC Frame-Error-Rate (FER) performance outperforms other cryptcoding methods by over 1.5 dB while maintaining the AES-128 security level. Moreover, the JSALC enables error resilience and has higher diffusion than AES-128.

Designing millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular system with good coverage necessitates the use of directional beams to transmit synchronization signals in the system, and with that comes several challenges. In this paper, we present a detailed synchronization channel (SCH) design for mmWave systems. We provide a link-budget study to determine the minimum required transmit and receive beamforming gains. We also present designs for the SCH pattern in the frame structure. We design SCH sequences and show that our design provides a 3 dB better performance than LTE under similar conditions. Moreover, we propose a method is based on a genetic algorithm, to efficiently synthesize the beams required to transmit SCH.

Dual-polarized antennas provide a mechanism to achieve polarization diversity or multiplex non-interfering data streams over-the-air. Practical realization of dual-polarized transmission, however, must overcome challenges such as mobile misorientation with respect to the base station as well as non-ideal polarization isolation. With the advent of mmWave communications, dual-polarized large scale antenna arrays can be realized inexpensively. In this paper, we propose a beamforming algorithm that jointly designs the horizontal and vertical beamformers and combiners to maximize spectral efficiency in the presence of mobile misorientation and polarization leakage. First, we show that dual-polarized antenna arrays introduce channel structure that enables mobile orientation estimation without explicit channel knowledge. We derive the maximum likelihood estimate of the azimuth and elevation mobile rotation. Given these estimates, we design the horizontal and vertical beamformer and combiner with practical RF hardware constraints. We generalize the beamforming algorithm to enable multiplexing multiple data streams across different channel paths in the horizontal and vertical domain. Results show that mobile orientation estimation using dual-polarized antenna arrays achieves over 90% accuracy even below 0 dB. Using a realistic clustered channel model, spectral efficiency gains of the order of 5 dB are demonstrated over dual-polarized antennas with independent horizontal/vertical beam steering as well as single polarized antenna arrays.

The interest in short range communication has significantly increased in the last decade with the introduction of different wireless connectivity standards and their evolution such as IEEE802.11n/ac and IEEE802.11ad. New demands for higher resolution multimedia applications such as UHD push for higher data rates to exceed 30Gbps. This high data rate demand requires short range standards to adopt a new approach to accommodate these rates. Millimeter wave enable high bandwidth usage which implies higher capacity to accommodate 10–100Gbps data rates. However, the high data rate pose big challenges to both the system algorithm and architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel FPGA-based high-throughput beamforming MIMO system for millimeter wave short range communication. We present our first realization of a complete millimeter wave short range communication system, which includes RF frontend, ADC/DAC, beamforming control, synchronization, channel estimation, MIMO precoding/detection, and channel encoder/decoder. The design works at millimeter carrier frequency with 500MHz bandwidth and 2-channel MIMO Beamforming. We show realtime application test results as captured in the millimeter wave system.

Next generation wireless backhaul systems may provide data rates exceeding 10 Gb/s using large bandwidth available at mmWave frequencies, and support features such as point-to-multipoint communication, non-line-of-sight communication, in-band operation (shared spectrum with access) and inter-BS coordination. We explore the feasibility of an “in-band” mmWave wireless base-station with the option of enabling backhaul transmission on one panel while simultaneously receiving access or backhaul on an adjacent panel. We show using simulations and lab measurement validation, that for a prototype 28 GHz mmWave system, the self-interference from the TX sector panel to the adjacent RX panel is around -70 to -80 dB and an additional 35-50 dB isolation is needed for enabling reception on adjacent RX panel that may be achieved through full duplex interference cancellation techniques.

In this paper we propose a new dual quantization-domain LDPC decoder, which requires only 3-bit messages between the check nodes and the variable nodes. To reduce complexity and save power, check nodes processing is entirely in the 3-bit domain. However, to avoid loss in performance, the variable nodes processing is in a higher bit precision domain. A non-linear mapping is used to map the messages from one quantization domain to the other. Simulations and hardware evaluation of the proposed decoder showed greater than 50% reduction in power consumption with only 0.1 dB (0.2 dB) loss in bit-error-performance when compared to a reference 5-bits scaled Min-Sum decoder over the AWGN (fading) channel.

Wireless LAN systems have been continuously evolving to provide ~10X increase in data rates every five years, exploiting higher mmWave frequencies and larger bandwidths, such as IEEE 802.11ad, providing 6.76 Gb/s using 2.16 GHz of bandwidth at 60 GHz. One of the key technical challenges to successful commercialization of these large bandwidth systems is power consumption. In this paper, we focus on reducing the idle listening mode power consumption where the device is actively looking for packets and the power consumption is dominated by the high speed ADCs. We propose a low power and bandwidth-scalable synchronization design for large bandwidth systems by developing reduced bandwidth modes in high-speed ADCs used in such systems. We study the impact of the proposed synchronization design on the detection probability, false alarm, AGC design and symbol timing estimation. Comparisons of our design using a bandwidth reduction of 4 with the existing IEEE 802. Had synchronization design show no loss in AWGN and a 0.8 dB loss in fading for an equivalent acquisition time and false alarm rate while providing a 33% power reduction in idle mode, assuming the ADCs consume 50% of the total idle power consumption. We also provide backward compatibility with current IEEE 802.11ad systems with limited impact on performance and power consumption.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) signals experience orders-of-magnitude more pathloss than the microwave signals currently used in most wireless applications and all cellular systems. MmWave systems must therefore leverage large antenna arrays, made possible by the decrease in wavelength, to combat pathloss with beamforming gain. Beamforming with multiple data streams, known as precoding, can be used to further improve mmWave spectral efficiency. Both beamforming and precoding are done digitally at baseband in traditional multi-antenna systems. The high cost and power consumption of mixed-signal devices in mmWave systems, however, make analog processing in the RF domain more attractive. This hardware limitation restricts the feasible set of precoders and combiners that can be applied by practical mmWave transceivers. In this paper, we consider transmit precoding and receiver combining in mmWave systems with large antenna arrays. We exploit the spatial structure of mmWave channels to formulate the precoding/combining problem as a sparse reconstruction problem. Using the principle of basis pursuit, we develop algorithms that accurately approximate optimal unconstrained precoders and combiners such that they can be implemented in low-cost RF hardware. We present numerical results on the performance of the proposed algorithms and show that they allow mmWave systems to approach their unconstrained performance limits, even when transceiver hardware constraints are considered.

In this paper, we present a novel FPGA-based high-throughput beamforming MIMO receiver for millimeter wave mobile communication. With vast spectrum and small antenna element size, millimeter wave communication becomes very attractive and promising to support next generation mobile communication (5G). However, the high data rate requirement challenges both algorithm and architecture. In order to support the high data rate and to reduce the overhead of selecting the best beam pair, we propose a novel beamforming synchronization scheme more suitable for mobile communication. By further optimizing the algorithm and the architecture, we present a complete mobile receiver based on FPGA, which includes RF frontend, ADC, beamforming control, synchronization, channel estimator, soft MAP detector, and channel decoder. The design operates at 28 GHz carrier frequency with 500 MHz bandwidth. The throughput can reach 1.52 Gbps. We also performed the indoor and outdoor over-the-air transmission field tests. This work provides a platform for future millimeter wave mobile communication research.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems must overcome heavy signal attenuation to support high-throughput wireless communication links. The small wavelength in mmWave systems enables beamforming using large antenna arrays to combat path loss with directional transmission. Beamforming with multiple data streams, known as precoding, can be used to achieve even higher performance. Both beamforming and precoding are done at baseband in traditional microwave systems. In mmWave systems, however, the high cost of mixed-signal and radio frequency chains (RF) makes operating in the passband and analog domains attractive. This hardware limitation places additional constraints on precoder design. In this paper, we consider single user beamforming and precoding in mmWave systems with large arrays. We exploit the structure of mmWave channels to formulate the precoder design problem as a sparsity constrained least squares problem. Using the principle of basis pursuit, we develop a precoding algorithm that approximates the optimal unconstrained precoder using a low dimensional basis representation that can be efficiently implemented in RF hardware. We present numerical results on the performance of the proposed algorithm and show that it allows mmWave systems to approach waterfilling capacity.

Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a short range wireless transmission of visible light through free space. The light source can be based on Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), that are becoming common use in our future connected home where they can be simultaneously used for both illumination (i.e. LED TVs, Light bulbs, etc.) and communication with appropriate photodiodes in the receiver side. VLC can be adapted to mobile devices enabling new types of short range applications such as HD video streaming. However, many of the new emerging mobile applications require increasingly high data rates; some can even exceed 1 Gbps. In this paper, we propose new optical/electrical front-end and baseband systems that achieve the required bit rate of 1 Gbps over free space. We also detail the implementation challenges of the low power VLC communication system for a mobile device. Specifically we focus on the new VLC baseband system and propose new baseband scheme with state-of-the-art LDPC channel coder. Finally, we will present the results of the new proposed gigabit baseband system as well as lab test results of a single channel VLC front-end running at 540 Mbps and 1080 Mbps.

Due to the scarcity of spectrum below 3 GHz for wireless communications, there have been proposals to explore millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum (3- 300 GHz) for commercial mobile applications. MmWave spectrum provides unique advantages such as availability of GHz bandwidth and use of antenna arrays with beamforming to compensate for path loss. While there exist well-established models for mmWave indoor non-line-of-sight (60 GHz) and mmWave outdoor line-of-sight (backhaul) communication, mmWave channels for outdoor, non-line-of-sight, mobile communication have not been explored sufficiently. We present penetration and reflection measurements for different materials and line-of-sight and non- line-of-sight measurements for outdoor mmWave mobile communication. We find that while well-known lossy objects such as human body and concrete can have poor penetration, they are good reflectors at these frequencies, enabling the receiver to capture secondary reflections for non-line-of-sight communication. We also show that a wide beam width, low gain antenna at the mobile receiver can capture more energy in scattered non-line-of-sight environments and thus, can provide more gain than a narrow beam, high gain antenna for mobile communication. Our initial measurements motivate utilizing mmWave frequencies for outdoor non-line- of-sight mobile communication.

In this paper, we present a method for creating LDPC codes which are specifically designed to be hardware friendly. Our method involves constraining the cyclic shift values in the base H-matrix to reduce the complexity of the cyclic shift hardware. We show that the decoder hardware implementation for these codes has higher throughput and lower power consumption than decoders designed for traditional LDPC codes. We provide results showing that these codes maintain the error rate performance expected of LDPC codes while achieving these throughput and power consumption improvements.

Almost all cellular mobile communications including first generation analog systems, second generation digital systems, third generation WCDMA, and fourth generation OFDMA systems use Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band of radio spectrum with frequencies in the range of 300MHz-3GHz. This band of spectrum is becoming increasingly crowded due to spectacular growth in mobile data and other related services. More recently, there have been proposals to explore mmWave spectrum (3-300GHz) for commercial mobile applications due to its unique advantages such as spectrum availability and small component sizes. In this paper, we discuss system design aspects such as antenna array design, base station and mobile station requirements. We also provide system performance and SINR geometry results to demonstrate the feasibility of an outdoor mmWave mobile broadband communication system. We note that with adaptive antenna array beamforming, multi-Gbps data rates can be supported for mobile cellular deployments.

The quality of any communication system is greatly determined by the performance excellence of the selected channel coding scheme. In this work, we propose algorithms for designing LDPC channel coding schemes. The proposed designs are suitable for achieving Gigabit communications with relatively low-power consumption. We design LDPC code family with fixed block length and no puncturing. Also, starting with an LDPC code base-family, we construct LDPC code families with longer block length but decodable using the same hardware as the base-family. We propose a unified decoder architecture, which can decode all LDPC codes in the designed base-family as well as all LDPC codes in the derived code families with longer block length.

Protograph-based LDPC and generalized LDPC (G-LDPC) codes have the advantages of a simple design procedure and highly structured encoders and decoders. The design of such “protograph-based codes” relies on what is effectively a computer-based search. As such, following Gallager, it is prudent to restrict the search to a “good ensemble,” for example, an ensemble whose minimum distance grows linearly with codeword length. A good ensemble can also mean one with good stopping set, trapping set, or pseudocodeword properties. In this paper, ensemble codeword weight enumerators for finite-length LDPC and G-LDPC codes based on protographs were derived, and then the asymptotic case was considered. The asymptotic results allow us to determine whether or not the typical relative minimum distance in the ensemble grows linearly with codeword length. Then, the codeword weight enumerator technique is adapted to yield ensemble stopping set, trapping set, and pseudocodeword enumerators for protograph LDPC and G-LDPC codes. In this case, the asymptotic results allow us to determine whether or not the typical relative smallest stopping set size, trapping set size, and pseudoweight grows linearly with codeword length. Trapping set enumerators for G-LDPC code ensembles represent a more complex problem which we do not consider here.

Protograph-based generalized LDPC (GLDPC) codes have the advantages of a simple design procedure and highly structured encoders and decoders. Recently, a technique for computing ensemble weight enumerators for GLDPC codes has been published. In the current paper, we investigate the existence of typical minimum distance for protograph-based GLDPC codes. That is, we first upper bound the ensemble weight enumerators for finite-length GLDPC codes based on protographs, and then we consider the sum of weight enumerators. The results allow us to determine whether or not the typical minimum distance in the ensemble grows linearly with codeword length. We provide conditions on the connections of degree-2 variable nodes to constraint nodes (short block codes) to have typical minimum distance. These conditions are related to the minimum distances of the constraint nodes.

Recently, pseudocodewords of Tanner graphs of LDPC codes have been used to explain the behavior of iterative decoders for these codes. In this paper, finite-length pseudocodeword weight enumerators for protograph-based generalized-LDPC code ensembles are obtained. Then asymptotic results are derived from the finite-length results by letting the block length go to infinity. The asymptotic results allow us to determine whether or not the typical minimum pseudocodeword weight grows linearly with codeword length. We give examples with Hamming component codes.

Protograph-based LDPC codes have the advantages of a simple design (or search) procedure and highly structured encoders and decoders. These advantages have also been exploited in the design of protograph-based generalized LDPC (G-LDPC) codes. Recently, a technique for computing ensemble weight enumerators and stopping set enumerators for protograph-based LDPC codes has been published. In the current paper, we extend those results to protograph-based G-LDPC codes. That is, we first derive ensemble weight and stopping set enumerators for finite-length G-LDPC codes based on protographs, and then we consider the asymptotic case. In the weight enumerator case, the asymptotic results allow us to determine whether or not the typical minimum distance in the ensemble grows linearly with codeword length. In the stopping set enumerator case, the asymptotic results allows us to determine whether or not the typical smallest stopping set size grows linearly with codeword length.