An official website of the United States government
To integrate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in future large-scale deployments, a new wireless communication paradigm, namely, the cellular-connected UAV has recently attracted interest. However, the line-of-sight dominant air-to-ground channels along with the antenna pattern of the cellular ground base stations (GBSs) introduce critical interference issues in cellular-connected UAV communications. In particular, the complex antenna pattern and the ground reflection (GR) from the down-tilted antennas create both coverage holes and patchy coverage for the UAVs in the sky, which leads to unreliable connectivity from the underlying cellular network. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new cellular architecture that employs an extra set of co-channel antennas oriented towards the sky to support UAVs on top of the existing down-tilted antennas for ground user equipment (GUE). To model the GR stemming from the down-tilted antennas, we propose a path-loss model, which takes both antenna radiation pattern and configuration into account. Next, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of the UAVs by tuning the up-tilt (UT) angles of the up-tilted antennas. Since this is an NP-hard problem, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) based heuristic method to optimize the UT angles of these antennas. After obtaining the optimal UT angles, we integrate the 3GPP Release-10 specified enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) to reduce the interference stemming from the down-tilted antennas. Our simulation results based on the hexagonal cell layout show that the proposed interference mitigation method can ensure higher minimum SIRs for the UAVs over baseline methods while creating minimal impact on the SIR of GUEs.
more »
« less
Reinforcement Learning Based Power-Optimal Usage of Beamforming Antenna Array for Multi-Way Wireless Communication in Vehicular Traffic Environments
There has been recent work on the design of antenna arrays for beamforming in dynamic evolving environments such as in vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems. A key problem is that of determining how to optimally use a large antenna array to communicate with multiple spatially located vehicles in dynamically changing channel conditions with minimal co-channel interference while minimizing overall power consumption of the wireless system. We envision disjoint subsets of antennas in the array being used to direct beams concurrently to different vehicles. The number of antennas, gain and phase of each RF-chain driving an antenna are optimized dynamically using a constrained quadratic cost formulation encompassing channel quality, interference and power consumption. This quadratic optimization problem is solved using behavior constrained bandit algorithm, a reinforcement learning based technique. A gaussian kernel is used to perform data clustering of vehicle environment and resulting solutions, allowing quick bootstrapping of the bandit solver to find optimal array configurations in real-time vehicle environments. Simulation studies prove the viability of the proposed scheme.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1815653
- PAR ID:
- 10410094
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Integrated sensing and communication has been identified as an enabling technology for forthcoming wireless networks. In an effort to achieve an improved performance trade-off between multiuser communications and radar sensing, this paper considers a dynamically-partitioned antenna array architecture for monostatic ISAC systems, in which each element of the array at the base station can function as either a transmit or receive antenna. To fully exploit the available spatial degrees of freedom for both communication and sensing functions, we jointly design the partitioning of the array between transmit and receive antennas together with the transmit beamforming in order to minimize the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation error, while satisfying constraints on the communication signal-to-interference-plusnoise ratio and the transmit power budget. An alternating algorithm based on Dinkelbach’s transform, the alternative direction method of multipliers, and majorization-minimization is developed to solve the resulting complicated optimization problem. To reduce the computational complexity, we also present a heuristic three-step strategy that optimizes the transmit beamforming after determining the antenna partitioning. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in significantly reducing the DOA estimation error.more » « less
-
This paper characterizes the impact of interference on vehicular communications employing beamforming links between transmitters and receivers operating within a multipath propagation environment. Different road scenarios, such as an intersection and a roundabout are considered to determine the performance characteristics of the vehicle communication link. By employing the results for different antenna array elements and by varying distance, we analyse the bit error rate (BER) of vehicles operating in multipath propagation environments with an interferer within the vicinity of an communication link.more » « less
-
The management of RF spectrum resources between heterogeneous RF devices has become more challenging with the advent of 5G, 6G and the desire to enable more spectrum sharing interactions in different bands. Most of the research on Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) algorithms considers non-cooperative scenarios with RF devices using omnidirectional antennas. In this paper, we study the effects of antenna directionality on cooperative DSA. Specifically, we develop a custom simulator for large-scale DSA networks that leverages IEEE 1900.5.2 Spectrum Consumption Models (SCMs) to enable coordination and computation of aggregate interference to deconflict spectrum use in large scale scenarios. SCMs offer a mechanism for RF devices to describe the characteristics of their use of spectrum and their needs in terms of interference protection. We create SCMs for RF systems with directional antennas based on measurements from a directional mmWave antenna and from the operational characteristics defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). We leverage these SCMs to perform a comparative analysis of spectrum use efficiency in cooperative DSA networks with up-to 300 links of transmitter-receiver RF devices using omnidirectional antennas vs similar networks using directional antennas with different half-power beam widths. The simulation results show the benefits to spectrum use efficiency that can be achieved with directional antennas and how largescale DSA methods can be studied and designed with the use of SCMs that incorporate detailed characteristics of directional antennas.more » « less
-
For 5G it will be important to leverage the available millimeter wave spectrum. To achieve an approximately omni- directional coverage with a similar effective antenna aperture compared to state-of-the-art cellular systems, an antenna array is required at both the mobile and basestation. Due to the large bandwidth and inefficient amplifiers available in CMOS for mmWave, the analog front-end of the receiver with a large number of antennas becomes especially power hungry. Two main solutions exist to reduce the power consumption: hybrid beam forming and digital beam forming with low resolution Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs). In this work we compare the spectral and energy efficiency of both systems under practical system constraints. We consider the effects of channel estimation, transmitter impairments and multiple simultaneous users for a wideband multipath model. Our power consumption model considers components reported in literature at 60 GHz. In contrast to many other works we also consider the correlation of the quantization error, and generalize the modeling of it to non- uniform quantizers and different quantizers at each antenna. The result shows that as the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) gets larger the ADC resolution achieving the optimal energy efficiency gets also larger. The energy efficiency peaks for 5 bit resolution at high SNR, since due to other limiting factors the achievable rate almost saturates at this resolution. We also show that in the multi- user scenario digital beamforming is in any case more energy efficient than hybrid beamforming. In addition we show that if mixed ADC resolutions are used we can achieve any desired trade-off between power consumption and rate close to those achieved with only one ADC resolution.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
