arXiv subjects

Ahmad AlAmmouri

Publications and source records attributed to Ahmad AlAmmouri.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Joint Phase Time Array: Opportunities, Challenges and System Design Considerations

This paper presents a novel approach to designing millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular communication systems, based on joint phase time array (JPTA) radio frequency (RF) frontend architecture. JPTA architecture comprises time-delay components appended to conventional phase shifters, which offer extra degrees of freedom to be exploited for designing frequency-selective analog beams. Hence, a mmWave device equipped with JPTA can receive and transmit signals in multiple directions in a single time slot per RF chain, one direction per frequency subband, which alleviates the traditional constraint of one analog beam per transceiver chain per time slot. The utilization of subband-specific analog beams offers a new opportunity in designing mmWave systems, allowing for enhanced cell capacity and reduced pilot overhead. To understand the practical feasibility of JPTA, a few challenges and system design considerations are discussed in relation to the performance and complexity of the JPTA systems. For example, frequency-selective beam gain losses are present for the subband analog beams, e.g., up to 1 dB losses for 2 subband cases, even with the state-of-the-art JPTA delay and phase optimization methods. Despite these side effects, system-level analysis reveals that the JPTA system is capable of improving cell capacity: 5-percentile cell throughput by up to 65 per cent. To the best of the author's knowledge, this paper is the first paper explaining the system-level benefits and system-design challenges of JPTA, with an analysis of the performance tradeoff based on an intuitive metric of beam gain losses.

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arXiv2025

Beamforming with Joint Phase and Time Array: System Design, Prototyping and Performance

Joint phase-time arrays (JPTA) is a new mmWave radio frequency front-end architecture constructed with appending time-delay elements to phase shifters for analog beamforming. JPTA allows the mmWave base station (BS) to form multiple frequency-dependent beams with a single RF chain, exploiting the extra degrees of freedom the time-delay elements offer. Without requiring extra power-hungry RF chains, a BS with JPTA can schedule multiple users in different directions in a frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) manner. A BS with JPTA achieves various advantages over the traditional analog beamforming system. Simulation results show that JPTA can bring significant system-level benefits, e.g., extending uplink throughput coverage by 100%. To realize these system benefits of JPTA, high-resolution delay elements with a wide delay dynamic range are essential. With newly developed delay elements, we demonstrate that a single TRX RF chain can serve four users in four different directions in the mmWave band.

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arXiv2024

3D Beamforming Through Joint Phase-Time Arrays

High-frequency wideband cellular communications over mmWave and sub-THz offer the opportunity for high data rates. However, it also presents high path loss, resulting in limited coverage. High-gain beamforming from the antenna array is essential to mitigate the coverage limitations. The conventional phased antenna arrays (PAA) cause high scheduling latency owing to analog beam constraints, i.e., only one frequency-flat beam is generated. Recently introduced joint phase-time array (JPTA) architecture, which utilizes both true-time-delay (TTD) units and phase shifters (PSs), alleviates analog beam constraints by creating multiple frequency-dependent beams for scheduling multiple users at different directions in a frequency-division manner. One class of previous studies offered solutions with ``rainbow" beams, which tend to allocate a small bandwidth per beam direction. Another class focused on uniform linear array (ULA) antenna architecture, whose frequency-dependent beams were designed along a single axis of either azimuth or elevation direction. This paper presents a novel 3D beamforming design that maximizes beamforming gain toward desired azimuth and elevation directions and across sub-bands partitioned according to scheduled users' bandwidth requirements. We provide analytical solutions and iterative algorithms to design the PSs and TTD units for a desired subband beam pattern. Through simulations of the beamforming gain, we observe that our proposed solutions outperform the state-of-the-art solutions reported elsewhere.

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arXiv2023

Joint Phase-Time Arrays: A Paradigm for Frequency-Dependent Analog Beamforming in 6G

Hybrid beamforming is an attractive solution to build cost-effective and energy-efficient transceivers for millimeter-wave and terahertz systems. However, conventional hybrid beamforming techniques rely on analog components that generate a frequency flat response such as phase-shifters and switches, which limits the flexibility of the achievable beam patterns. As a novel alternative, this paper proposes a new class of hybrid beamforming called Joint phase-time arrays (JPTA), that additionally use true-time delay elements in the analog beamforming to create frequency-dependent analog beams. Using as an example two important frequency-dependent beam behaviors, the numerous benefits of such flexibility are exemplified. Subsequently, the JPTA beamformer design problem to generate any desired beam behavior is formulated and near-optimal algorithms to the problem are proposed. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms can outperform heuristics solutions for JPTA beamformer update. Furthermore, it is shown that JPTA can achieve the two exemplified beam behaviors with one radio-frequency chain, while conventional hybrid beamforming requires the radio-frequency chains to scale with the number of antennas to achieve similar performance. Finally, a wide range of problems to further tap into the potential of JPTA are also listed as future directions.

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arXiv2020

Stability and Metastability of Traffic Dynamics in Uplink Random Access Networks

We characterize the stability, metastability, and the stationary regime of traffic dynamics in a single-cell uplink wireless system. The traffic is represented in terms of spatial birth-death processes, in which users arrive as a Poisson point process in time and space, each with a file to transmit to the base station. The service rate of each user is based on its signal to interference plus noise ratio, where the interference is from other active users in the cell. Once the file is fully transmitted, the user leaves the cell. We derive the necessary and sufficient condition for network stability, which is independent of the specific bounded path loss function. A novel observation is that for a certain range of arrival rates, the network appears stable for a possibly long time, and then suddenly exhibits instability. This property, which is known in statistical physics but rarely observed in wireless communication, is called metastability. Finally, we propose two heuristic characterizations based on mean-field interpretation, of the network steady-state regime when it exists. The first-order approximation is very simple to compute, but loose in some regimes, whereas the second-order approximation is more sophisticated but tight for the whole range of arrival rates.

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arXiv2020

Deep Learning Predictive Band Switching in Wireless Networks

In cellular systems, the user equipment (UE) can request a change in the frequency band when its rate drops below a threshold on the current band. The UE is then instructed by the base station (BS) to measure the quality of candidate bands, which requires a measurement gap in the data transmission, thus lowering the data rate. We propose an online-learning based band switching approach that does not require any measurement gap. Our proposed classifier-based band switching policy instead exploits spatial and spectral correlation between radio frequency signals in different bands based on knowledge of the UE location. We focus on switching between a lower (e.g., 3.5 GHz) band and a millimeter wave band (e.g., 28 GHz), and design and evaluate two classification models that are trained on a ray-tracing dataset. A key insight is that measurement gaps are overkill, in that only the relative order of the bands is necessary for band selection, rather than a full channel estimate. Our proposed machine learning based policies achieve roughly 30% improvement in mean effective rates over those of the industry standard policy, while achieving misclassification errors well below 0.5% and maintaining resilience against blockage uncertainty.

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arXiv2020

Escaping the Densification Plateau in Cellular Networks Through mmWave Beamforming

We study how dense multi-antenna millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular network performance scales in terms of the base station (BS) spatial density $λ$, by studying the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the area spectral efficiency (ASE). If the number of antennas at each BS scales at least linearly with $λ$, which increases the number of possible beam configurations and their main-lobe gain, and decreases their side-lobe gain, we prove that the SINR approaches a finite random variable that is independent of $λ$ and the ASE scales at least linearly with $λ$. In contrast, if the number of antennas scales sub-linearly with $λ$, then the SINR decays to zero and the ASE saturates to a constant. Thus, by moving to higher carrier frequencies with successively smaller antennas, and exploiting the correspondingly increased directionality, cellular operators can in principle avoid the densification plateau (or collapse) in cellular networks and instead continue to harvest linear sum throughput gains through BS densification.

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arXiv2020

Scaling Laws of Dense Multi-Antenna Cellular Networks

We study the scaling laws of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and the area spectral efficiency (ASE) in multi-antenna cellular networks, where the number of antennas scales with the base station (BS) spatial density $λ$, under the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channels. We start with the MISO case with $N_t(λ)$ transmit antennas and a single receive antenna and prove that the average SINR scales as $\frac{N_t(λ)}λ$ and the average ASE scales as $λ\log\left(1+\frac{N_t(λ)}λ\right)$. For the MIMO case with single-stream eigenbeamforming and $N_r(λ) \leq N_t(λ)$ receive antennas, we prove that the scaling laws of the conditional SINR and ASE are agnostic to $N_r(λ)$ and scale exactly the same as the MISO case. Hence, deploying multi-antenna BSs can help maintain non-zero per-user throughput and a corresponding linear increase in the ASE in dense cellular networks.

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arXiv2020

Area Spectral Efficiency and SINR Scaling Laws in Multi-Antenna Cellular Networks

We study the scaling laws of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and area spectral efficiency (ASE) in multi-antenna cellular networks, where the number of antennas scales with the base station (BS) spatial density $λ$. We start with the MISO case having $N_t(λ)$ transmit antennas and a single receive antenna and prove that the average SINR scales as $\frac{N_t(λ)}λ$ and the average ASE scales as $λ\log\left(1+\frac{N_t(λ)}λ\right)$. For the MIMO case with single-stream eigenbeamforming and $N_r(λ) \leq N_t(λ)$ receive antennas, we prove that the scaling laws of the conditional SINR and ASE are exactly the same as the MISO case, i.e. not dependent on $N_r(λ)$. We also show that coordinated beamforming amongst $K\leq N_t(λ)$ neighboring BSs does not improve the scaling laws regardless of $K$. From a system design perspective, our results suggest that deploying multi-antenna BSs can help maintain the per-user throughput and the linear increase in the ASE with BS density, while the number of antennas at the user equipment and the use of BS cooperation do not matter much.

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arXiv2019

Grip-Aware Analog mmWave Beam Codebook Adaptation for 5G Mobile Handsets

This paper studies the effect of the user hand grip on the design of beamforming codebooks for 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) mobile handsets. The high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS) is used to characterize the radiation fields for fourteen possible handgrip profiles based on experiments we conducted. The loss from hand blockage on the antenna gains can be up to 20-25 dB, which implies that the possible hand grip profiles need to be taken into account while designing beam codebooks. Specifically, we consider three different codebook adaption schemes: a grip-aware scheme, where perfect knowledge of the hand grip is available; a semi-aware scheme, where just the application (voice call, messaging, etc.) and the orientation of the mobile handset is known; and a grip-agnostic scheme, where the codebook ignores hand blockage. Our results show that the ideal grip-aware scheme can provide more than 50% gain in terms of the spherical coverage over the agnostic scheme, depending on the grip and orientation. Encouragingly, the more practical semi-aware scheme we propose provides performance approaching the fully grip-aware scheme. Overall, we demonstrate that 5G mmWave handsets are different from pre-5G handsets: the user grip needs to be explicitly factored into the codebook design.

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arXiv2019

Beam Codebook Design for 5G mmWave Terminals

A beam codebook of 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) for data communication consists of multiple high-peak-gain beams to compensate the high pathloss at the mmWave bands. These beams also have to point to different angular directions, such that by performing beam searching over the codebook, a good mmWave signal coverage over the full sphere around the terminal (spherical coverage) can be achieved. A model-based beam codebook design that assumes ideal omni-directional antenna pattern, and neglects the impact of terminal housing around the antenna, does not work well because the radiation pattern of a practical mmWave antenna combined with the impact of terminal housing is highly irregular. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient data-driven method to generate a beam codebook to boost the spherical coverage of mmWave terminals. The method takes as inputs the measured or simulated electric field response data of each antenna and provides the codebook according to the requirements on the codebook size, spherical coverage, etc. The method can be applied in a straightforward manner to different antenna type, antenna array configuration, placement and terminal housing design. Our simulation results show that the proposed method generates a codebook better than the benchmark and 802.15.3c codebooks in terms of the spherical coverage.

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arXiv2018

A Unified Asymptotic Analysis of Area Spectral Efficiency in Ultradense Cellular Networks

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of average area spectral efficiency (ASE) of a downlink cellular network in the limit of very dense base station (BS) and user densities. This asymptotic analysis relies on three assumptions: (1) interference is treated as noise; (2) the BS locations are drawn from a Poisson point process; (3) the path loss function is bounded above satisfying mild regularity conditions. We consider three possible definitions of the average ASE, all of which give units of bits per second per unit bandwidth per unit area. When there is no constraint on the minimum operational signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and instantaneous full channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter, the average ASE is proven to saturate to a constant, which we derive in a closed form. For the other two ASE definitions, wherein either a minimum SINR is enforced or CSI is not available, the average ASE is instead shown to collapse to zero at high BS density. We provide several familiar case studies for the class of considered path loss models, and demonstrate that our results cover most previous models and results on ultradense networks as special cases.

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arXiv2017

SINR and Throughput of Dense Cellular Networks with Stretched Exponential Path Loss

Distance-based attenuation is a critical aspect of wireless communications. As opposed to the ubiquitous power-law path loss model, this paper proposes a stretched exponential path loss model that is suitable for short-range communication. In this model, the signal power attenuates over a distance $r$ as $e^{-αr^β}$, where $α,β$ are tunable parameters. Using experimental propagation measurements, we show that the proposed model is accurate for short to moderate distances in the range $r \in (5,300)$ meters and so is a suitable model for dense and ultradense networks. We integrate this path loss model into a downlink cellular network with base stations modeled by a Poisson point process, and derive expressions for the coverage probability, potential throughput, and area spectral efficiency. Although the most general result for coverage probability has a double integral, several special cases are given where the coverage probability has a compact or even closed form. We then show that the potential throughput is maximized for a particular BS density and then collapses to zero for high densities, assuming a fixed SINR threshold. We next prove that the area spectral efficiency, which assumes an adaptive SINR threshold, is non-decreasing with the BS density and converges to a constant for high densities.

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arXiv2016

In-Band $α$-Duplex Scheme for Cellular Networks: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

In-band full-duplex (FD) communications have been optimistically promoted to improve the spectrum utilization and efficiency. However, the penetration of FD communications to the cellular networks domain is challenging due to the imposed uplink/downlink interference. This paper presents a tractable framework, based on stochastic geometry, to study FD communications in cellular networks. Particularly, we assess the FD communications effect on the network performance and quantify the associated gains. The study proves the vulnerability of the uplink to the downlink interference and shows that the improved FD rate gains harvested in the downlink (up to $97\%$) comes at the expense of a significant degradation in the uplink rate (up to $94\%$). Therefore, we propose a novel fine-grained duplexing scheme, denoted as $α$-duplex scheme, which allows a partial overlap between the uplink and the downlink frequency bands. We derive the required conditions to harvest rate gains from the $α$-duplex scheme and show its superiority to both the FD and half-duplex (HD) schemes. In particular, we show that the $α$-duplex scheme provides a simultaneous improvement of $28\%$ for the downlink rate and $56\%$ for the uplink rate. Finally, we show that the amount of the overlap can be optimized based on the network design objective.

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arXiv2016

Flexible Design for $α$-Duplex Communications in Multi-Tier Cellular Networks

Backward compatibility is an essential ingredient for the success of new technologies. In the context of in-band full-duplex (FD) communication, FD base stations (BSs) should support half-duplex (HD) users' equipment (UEs) without sacrificing the foreseen FD gains. This paper presents flexible and tractable modeling framework for multi-tier cellular networks with FD BSs and FD/HD UEs. The presented model is based on stochastic geometry and accounts for the intrinsic vulnerability of uplink transmissions. The results show that FD UEs are not necessarily required to harvest rate gains from FD BSs. In particular, the results show that adding FD UEs to FD BSs offers a maximum of $5\%$ rate gain over FD BSs and HD UEs case if multi-user diversity is exploited, which is a marginal gain compared to the burden required to implement FD transceivers at the UEs' side. To this end, we shed light on practical scenarios where HD UEs operation with FD BSs outperforms the operation when both the BSs and UEs are FD and we find a closed form expression for the critical value of the self-interference attenuation power required for the FD UEs to outperform HD UEs.

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arXiv2016

Can Uplink Transmissions Survive in Full-duplex Cellular Environments?

In-band full-duplex (FD) communication is considered a potential candidate to be adopted by the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. FD communication renders the entire spectrum simultaneously accessible by uplink and downlink, and hence, is optimistically promoted to double the transmission rate. While this is true for a single communication link, cross-mode interference (i.e., interference between uplink and downlink) may diminish the full-duplexing gain. This paper studies FD operation in large-scale cellular networks with real base stations (BSs) locations and 3GPP propagation environment. The results show that the uplink is the bottleneck for FD operation due to the overwhelming cross-mode interference from BSs. Operating uplink and downlink on a common set of channels in an FD fashion improves the downlink rate but significantly degrades (over 1000-fold) the uplink rate. Therefore, we propose the $α$-duplex scheme to balance the tradeoff between the uplink and downlink rates via adjustable partial overlap between uplink and downlink channels. The $α$-duplex scheme can provide a simultaneous $30\%$ improvement in each of the uplink and downlink rates. To this end, we discuss the backward compatibility of the $α$-duplex scheme with half-duplex user-terminals. Finally, we point out future research directions for FD enabled cellular networks.

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arXiv2016

Harvesting Full-Duplex Rate Gains in Cellular Networks with Half-Duplex User Terminals

Full-Duplex (FD) transceivers may be expensive in terms of complexity, power consumption, and price to be implemented in all user terminals. Therefore, techniques to exploit in-band full-duplex communication with FD base stations (BSs) and half-duplex (HD) users' equipment (UEs) are required. In this context, 3-node topology (3NT) has been recently proposed for FD BSs to reuse the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) channels with HD terminals within the same cell. In this paper, we present a tractable mathematical framework, based on stochastic geometry, for 3NT in cellular networks. To this end, we propose a design paradigm via pulse-shaping and partial overlap between UL and DL channels to maximize the harvested rate gains in 3NT. The results show that 3NT achieves a close performance to networks with FD BSs and FD UEs, denoted by 2-node topology (2NT) networks. A maximum of 5$\%$ rate loss is reported when 3NT is compared to 2NT with efficient self-interference cancellation (SIC). If the SIC in 2NT is not efficient, 3NT highly outperforms 2NT. Consequently, we conclude that, irrespective to the UE duplexing scheme, it is sufficient to have FD BSs to harvest FD rate gains.

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arXiv2016

Modeling Cellular Networks in Fading Environments with Dominant Specular Components

Stochastic geometry (SG) has been widely accepted as a fundamental tool for modeling and analyzing cellular networks. However, the fading models used with SG analysis are mainly confined to the simplistic Rayleigh fading, which is extended to the Nakagami-m fading in some special cases. However, neither the Rayleigh nor the Nakagami-m accounts for dominant specular components (DSCs) which may appear in realistic fading channels. In this paper, we present a tractable model for cellular networks with generalized two-ray (GTR) fading channel. The GTR fading explicitly accounts for two DSCs in addition to the diffuse components and offers high flexibility to capture diverse fading channels that appear in realistic outdoor/indoor wireless communication scenarios. It also encompasses the famous Rayleigh and Rician fading as special cases. To this end, the prominent effect of DSCs is highlighted in terms of average spectral efficiency.

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