arXiv subjects

Hongbin Li

Publications and source records attributed to Hongbin Li.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications: Joint Active and Passive Precoding Design

Millimeter wave (MmWave) communications is capable of supporting multi-gigabit wireless access thanks to its abundant spectrum resource. However, the severe path loss and high directivity make it vulnerable to blockage events, which can be frequent in indoor and dense urban environments. To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) as a new technology to provide effective reflected paths to enhance coverage of mmWave signals. In this framework, we study joint active and passive precoding design for IRS-assisted mmWave systems, where multiple IRSs are deployed to assist the data transmission from a base station (BS) to a single-antenna receiver. Our objective is to maximize the received signal power by jointly optimizing the transmit precoding vector at the BS and the phase shift parameters used by IRSs for passive beamforming. Although such an optimization problem is generally non-convex, we show that, by exploiting some important characteristics of mmWave channels, an optimal closed-form solution can be derived for the single IRS case and a near-optimal analytical solution can be obtained for the multi-IRS case. Our analysis reveals that the received signal power increases quadratically with the number of reflecting elements for both the single IRS and multi-IRS cases. Simulation results are included to verify the optimality and near-optimality of our proposed solutions. Results also show that IRSs can help create effective virtual LOS paths and thus substantially improve robustness against blockages in mmWave communications.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Joint Transceiver and Large Intelligent Surface Design for Massive MIMO MmWave Systems

Large intelligent surface (LIS) has recently emerged as a potential low-cost solution to reshape the wireless propagation environment for improving the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we consider a downlink millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system, where an LIS is deployed to assist the downlink data transmission from a base station (BS) to a user equipment (UE). Both the BS and the UE are equipped with a large number of antennas, and a hybrid analog/digital precoding/combining structure is used to reduce the hardware cost and energy consumption. We aim to maximize the spectral efficiency by jointly optimizing the LIS's reflection coefficients and the hybrid precoder (combiner) at the BS (UE). To tackle this non-convex problem, we reformulate the complex optimization problem into a much more friendly optimization problem by exploiting the inherent structure of the effective (cascade) mmWave channel. A manifold optimization (MO)-based algorithm is then developed. Simulation results show that by carefully devising LIS's reflection coefficients, our proposed method can help realize a favorable propagation environment with a small channel matrix condition number. Besides, it can achieve a performance comparable to those of state-of-the-art algorithms, while at a much lower computational complexity.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2020

Low-complexity Point Cloud Filtering for LiDAR by PCA-based Dimension Reduction

Signals emitted by LiDAR sensors would often be negatively influenced during transmission by rain, fog, dust, atmospheric particles, scattering of light and other influencing factors, causing noises in point cloud images. To address this problem, this paper develops a new noise reduction method to filter LiDAR point clouds, i.e. an adaptive clustering method based on principal component analysis (PCA). Different from the traditional filtering methods that directly process three-dimension (3D) point cloud data, the proposed method uses dimension reduction to generate two-dimension (2D) data by extracting the first principal component and the second principal component of the original data with little information attrition. In the 2D space spanned by two principal components, the generated 2D data are clustered for noise reduction before being restored into 3D. Through dimension reduction and the clustering of the generated 2D data, this method derives low computational complexity, effectively removing noises while retaining details of environmental features. Compared with traditional filtering algorithms, the proposed method has higher precision and recall. Experimental results show a F-score as high as 0.92 with complexity reduced by 50% compared with traditional density-based clustering method.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Power Allocation for Coexisting Multicarrier Radar and Communication Systems in Cluttered Environments

In this paper, power allocation is examined for the coexistence of a radar and a communication system that employ multicarrier waveforms. We propose two designs for the considered spectrum sharing problem by maximizing the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at the radar receiver while maintaining certain communication throughput and power constraints. The first is a joint design where the subchannel powers of both the radar and communication systems are jointly optimized. Since the resulting problem is highly nonconvex, we introduce a reformulation by combining the power variables of both systems into a single stacked variable, which allows us to bypass a conventional computationally intensive alternating optimization procedure. The resulting problem is then solved via a quadratic transform method along with a sequential convex programming (SCP) technique. The second is a unilateral design which optimizes the radar transmission power with fixed communication power. The unilateral design is suitable for cases where the communication system pre-exists while the radar occasionally joins the channel as a secondary user. The problem is solved by a Taylor expansion based iterative SCP procedure. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint and unilateral designs in comparison with a subcarrier allocation based method.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Compressed Channel Estimation and Joint Beamforming for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Systems

In this paper, we consider channel estimation for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, where an IRS is deployed to assist the data transmission from the base station (BS) to a user. It is shown that for the purpose of joint active and passive beamforming, the knowledge of a large-size cascade channel matrix needs to be acquired. To reduce the training overhead, the inherent sparsity in mmWave channels is exploited. By utilizing properties of Katri-Rao and Kronecker products, we find a sparse representation of the cascade channel and convert cascade channel estimation into a sparse signal recovery problem. Simulation results show that our proposed method can provide an accurate channel estimate and achieve a substantial training overhead reduction.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Angular Trapping of Spherical Janus Particles

Developing angular trapping methods, which will enable optical tweezers to rotate a micronized bead, is of great importance for the studies of biomacromolecules during a wide range of torque-generation processes. Here we report a novel controlled angular trapping method based on composite Janus particles. We used a chemically synthesized Janus particle, which consists of two hemispheres made of polystyrene (PS) and poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) respectively, as a model system to demonstrate this method. Through computational and experimental studies, we demonstrated the feasibility to control the rotation of a Janus particle in a linearly polarized laser trap. Our results showed that the Janus particle aligned its two hemisphere's interface parallel to the laser propagation direction as well as the laser polarization direction. In our experiments, the rotational state of the particle can be easily and directly visualized by using a CMOS camera, and does not require complex optical detection system. The rotation of the Janus particle in the laser trap can be fully controlled in real time by controlling the laser polarization direction. Our newly developed angular trapping technique has the great advantage of easy implementation and real time controllability. Considering the easy chemical synthesis of Janus particles and implementation of the angular trapping, this novel method has the potential of becoming a general angular trapping method. We anticipate that this new method will significantly broaden the availability of angular trapping in the biophysics community, and expand the scope of the research that can be enabled by the angular trapping approach.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

Joint Active and Passive Beamforming for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Massive MIMO Systems

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.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Joint Waveform and Receiver Design for Co-Channel Hybrid Active-Passive Sensing with Timing Uncertainty

We consider a hybrid active-passive radar system that employs a wireless source as a passive illuminator of opportunity (IO) and a co-channel active radar transmitter operating in the same frequency band to seek spectral efficiency. The hybrid system can take advantage of the strengths of passive radar (e.g., energy efficiency, bi-/multi-static configuration, and spatial diversity) as well as those of active radar (dedicated transmitter, flexible transmit beam steering, waveform optimized for sensing, etc.). To mitigate the mutual interference and location-induced timing uncertainty between the radar and communication signals, we propose two designs for the joint optimization of the radar waveform and receive filters. The first is a max-min (MM) criterion that optimizes a worst-case performance metric over a timing uncertainty interval, and the other a weighted-sum (WS) criterion that forms a weighted sum of the performance metric at each delay within the delay uncertainty interval. Both design criteria result in nonconvex constrained optimization problems that are solved by sequential convex programming methods. When timing uncertainty vanishes, the two designs become identical and admit a simpler solution. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed hybrid schemes in comparison with conventional active-only and passive-only radar systems.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Joint Beamforming for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications are evolving as a promising technology to meet the ever increasing data rate requirements. However, high directivity and severe path loss make it vulnerable to blockages, which could be frequent in indoor or urban environments. To address this issue, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are introduced to provide additional adjustable reflected paths. Most prior works assume that elements of IRSs have an infinite phase resolution, which is difficult to be realized in practical systems. In this paper, IRSs with low-resolution phase shifters are considered. We aim to maximize the receive signal power at the user by jointly optimizing discrete phase shifts of IRSs and the transmit beamforming vector at the base station for mmWave downlink systems. An analytical near-optimal solution is developed by exploiting some important characteristics of mmWave channels. Our theoretical analysis reveals that low-resolution phase shifters can still achieve a receive signal power that increases quadratically with the number of reflecting elements. Simulation results are provided to corroborate our analysis and show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Fast Compressed Power Spectrum Estimation: Towards A Practical Solution for Wideband Spectrum Sensing

There has been a growing interest in wideband spectrum sensing due to its applications in cognitive radios and electronic surveillance. To overcome the sampling rate bottleneck for wideband spectrum sensing, in this paper, we study the problem of compressed power spectrum estimation whose objective is to reconstruct the power spectrum of a wide-sense stationary signal based on sub-Nyquist samples. By exploring the sampling structure inherent in the multicoset sampling scheme, we develop a computationally efficient method for power spectrum reconstruction. An important advantage of our proposed method over existing compressed power spectrum estimation methods is that our proposed method, whose primary computational task consists of fast Fourier transform (FFT), has a very low computational complexity. Such a merit makes it possible to efficiently implement the proposed algorithm in a practical field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based system for real-time wideband spectrum sensing. Our proposed method also provides a new perspective on the power spectrum recovery condition, which leads to a result similar to what was reported in prior works. Simulation results are presented to show the computational efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Fast Beam Alignment for Millimeter Wave Communications: A Sparse Encoding and Phaseless Decoding Approach

In this paper, we studied the problem of beam alignment for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, in which we assume a hybrid analog and digital beamforming structure is employed at the transmitter (i.e. base station), and an omni-directional antenna or an antenna array is used at the receiver (i.e. user). By exploiting the sparse scattering nature of mmWave channels, the beam alignment problem is formulated as a sparse encoding and phaseless decoding problem. More specifically, the problem of interest involves finding a sparse sensing matrix and an efficient recovery algorithm to recover the support and magnitude of the sparse signal from compressive phaseless measurements. A sparse bipartite graph coding (SBG-Coding) algorithm is developed for sparse encoding and phaseless decoding. Our theoretical analysis shows that, in the noiseless case, our proposed algorithm can perfectly recover the support and magnitude of the sparse signal with probability exceeding a pre-specified value from $\mathcal{O}(K^2)$ measurements, where $K$ is the number of nonzero entries of the sparse signal. The proposed algorithm has a simple decoding procedure which is computationally efficient and noise-robust. Simulation results show that our proposed method renders a reliable beam alignment in the low and moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes and presents a clear performance advantage over existing methods.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Maximum Correntropy Derivative-Free Robust Kalman Filter and Smoother

We consider the problem of robust estimation involving filtering and smoothing for nonlinear state space models which are disturbed by heavy-tailed impulsive noises. To deal with heavy-tailed noises and improve the robustness of the traditional nonlinear Gaussian Kalman filter and smoother, we propose in this work a general framework of robust filtering and smoothing, which adopts a new maximum correntropy criterion to replace the minimum mean square error for state estimation. To facilitate understanding, we present our robust framework in conjunction with the cubature Kalman filter and smoother. A half-quadratic optimization method is utilized to solve the formulated robust estimation problems, which leads to a new maximum correntropy derivative-free robust Kalman filter and smoother. Simulation results show that the proposed methods achieve a substantial performance improvement over the conventional and existing robust ones with slight computational time increase.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2018

Proximal-Free ADMM for Decentralized Composite Optimization via Graph Simplification

We consider the problem of decentralized composite optimization over a symmetric connected graph, in which each node holds its own agent-specific private convex functions, and communications are only allowed between nodes with direct links. A variety of algorithms have been proposed to solve such a problem in an alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) framework. Many of these algorithms, however, need to include some proximal term in the augmented Lagrangian function such that the resulting algorithm can be implemented in a decentralized manner. The use of the proximal term slows down the convergence speed because it forces the current solution to stay close to the solution obtained in the previous iteration. To address this issue, in this paper, we first introduce the notion of simplest bipartite graph, which is defined as a bipartite graph that has a minimum number of edges to keep the graph connected. A simple two-step message passing-based procedure is proposed to find a simplest bipartite graph associated with the original graph. We show that the simplest bipartite graph has some interesting properties. By utilizing these properties, an ADMM without involving any proximal terms can be developed to perform decentralized composite optimization over the simplest bipartite graph. Simulation results show that our proposed method achieves a much faster convergence speed than existing state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms.

math.OC↗

arXiv2018

SN 2014J in M82: New Insights On the Spectral Diversity of Type Ia Supernovae

We present extensive spectroscopic observations for one of the closest type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), SN 2014J discovered in M82, ranging from 10.4 days before to 473.2 days after B-band maximum light. The diffuse interstellar band (DIB) features detected in a high-resolution spectrum allow an estimate of line-of-sight extinction as Av=1.9+/-0.6 mag. Spectroscopically, SN 2014J can be put into the high-velocity (HV) subgroup in Wang's classification with a velocity of Si~II 6355 at maximum light as about 12200 km/s, but has a low velocity gradient (LVG, following Benetti's classification) as 41+/-2 km/s/day, which is inconsistent with the trend that HV SNe Ia generally have larger velocity gradients. We find that the HV SNe Ia with LVGs tend to have relatively stronger Si III (at ~4400 Angstrom) absorptions in early spectra, larger ratios of S II 5468 to S II 5640, and weaker Si II 5972 absorptions compared to their counterparts with similar velocities but high velocity gradients. This shows that the HV+LVG subgroup of SNe Ia may have intrinsically higher photospheric temperature, which indicates that their progenitors may experience more complete burning in the explosions relative to the typical HV SNe Ia.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

Investigating the Efficiency of the Beijing Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (BFOSC) of the Xinglong 2.16-m Reflector

The Beijing Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (BFOSC) is one of the most important instruments of the 2.16-m telescope of the Xinglong Observatory. Every year there are ~ 20 SCI-papers published based on the observational data of this telescope. In this work, we have systemically measured the total efficiency of the BFOSC of the 2.16-m reflector, based on the observations of two ESO flux standard stars. We have obtained the total efficiencies of the BFOSC instrument of different grisms with various slit widths in almost all ranges, and analysed the factors which effect the efficiency of telescope and spectrograph. For the astronomical observers, the result will be useful for them to select a suitable slit width, depending on their scientific goals and weather conditions during the observation; For the technicians, the result will help them systemically find out the real efficiency of telescope and spectrograph, and further to improve the total efficiency and observing capacity of the telescope technically.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

Intelligent Power Control for Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radios: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

We consider the problem of spectrum sharing in a cognitive radio system consisting of a primary user and a secondary user. The primary user and the secondary user work in a non-cooperative manner. Specifically, the primary user is assumed to update its transmit power based on a pre-defined power control policy. The secondary user does not have any knowledge about the primary user's transmit power, or its power control strategy. The objective of this paper is to develop a learning-based power control method for the secondary user in order to share the common spectrum with the primary user. To assist the secondary user, a set of sensor nodes are spatially deployed to collect the received signal strength information at different locations in the wireless environment. We develop a deep reinforcement learning-based method, which the secondary user can use to intelligently adjust its transmit power such that after a few rounds of interaction with the primary user, both users can transmit their own data successfully with required qualities of service. Our experimental results show that the secondary user can interact with the primary user efficiently to reach a goal state (defined as a state in which both users can successfully transmit their data) from any initial states within a few number of steps.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

An H$α$ Imaging Survey of the Low-surface-brightness Galaxies Selected from the Fall Sky Region of the 40$\%$ ALFALFA \ion{H}{1} Survey

We present the observed H$α$ flux and derived star formation rates (SFRs) for a fall sample of low$-$surface$-$brightness galaxies (LSBGs). The sample is selected from the fall sky region of the 40$\%$ ALFALFA {\ion{H}{1}} survey $-$ SDSS DR7 photometric data, and all the $Hα$ images were obtained using the 2.16 m telescope, operated by the National Astronomy Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences. A total of 111 LSBGs were observed and $Hα$ flux was measured in 92 of them. Though almost all the LSBGs in our sample are {\ion{H}{1}}$-$rich, their SFRs derived from the extinction and filter$-$transmission$-$corrected $Hα$ flux, are less than 1$M_{\sun}$$yr^{-1}$. LSBGs and star forming galaxies have similar {\ion{H}{1}} surface densities, but LSBGs have much lower SFRs and SFR surface densities than star$-$forming galaxies. Our results show that LSBGs deviate from the Kennicutt-Schmidt law significantly, which indicate that they have low star formation efficiency. The SFRs of LSBGs are close to average SFRs in Hubble time and support the previous arguments that most of the LSBGs are stable systems and they tend to seldom contain strong interactions or major mergers during their star formation histories.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2017

Phased Array-Based Sub-Nyquist Sampling for Joint Wideband Spectrum Sensing and Direction-of-Arrival Estimation

In this paper, we study the problem of joint wideband spectrum sensing and direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation in a sub-Nyquist sampling framework. Specifically, considering a scenario where a few uncorrelated narrowband signals spread over a wide (say, several GHz) frequency band, our objective is to estimate the carrier frequencies and the DoAs associated with the narrowband sources, as well as reconstruct the power spectra of these narrowband signals. To overcome the sampling rate bottleneck for wideband spectrum sensing, we propose a new phased-array based sub-Nyquist sampling architecture with variable time delays, where a uniform linear array (ULA) is employed and the received signal at each antenna is delayed by a variable amount of time and then sampled by a synchronized low-rate analog-digital converter (ADC). Based on the collected sub-Nyquist samples, we calculate a set of cross-correlation matrices with different time lags, and develop a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition-based method for joint DoA, carrier frequency and power spectrum recovery. Perfect recovery conditions for the associated parameters and the power spectrum are analyzed. Our analysis reveals that our proposed method does not require to place any sparse constraint on the wideband spectrum, only needs the sampling rate to be greater than the bandwidth of the narrowband source signal with the largest bandwidth among all sources. Simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve an estimation accuracy close to the associated Cramér-Rao bounds (CRBs) using only a small number of data samples.

eess.SP↗