arXiv subjects

Vasanthan Raghavan

Publications and source records attributed to Vasanthan Raghavan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Mitigating Hand Blockage with Non-Directional Beamforming Codebooks

Hand blockage leads to significant performance impairments at millimeter wave carrier frequencies. A number of prior works have characterized the loss in signal strength with the hand using studies with horn antennas and form-factor user equipments (UEs). However, the impact of the hand on the effective phase response seen by the antenna elements has not been studied so far. Towards this goal, we consider a measurement framework that uses a hand phantom holding the UE in relaxed positions reflective of talk mode, watching videos, and playing games. We first study the impact of blockage on a directional beam steering codebook. The tight phase relationship across antenna elements needed to steer beams leads to a significant performance degradation as the hand surface can distort the observed amplitudes and phases across the antenna elements, which cannot be matched by this codebook. To overcome this loss, we propose a non-directional beamforming codebook made of amplitudes and/or quantized phases with both these quantities estimated as necessary. Theoretical as well as numerical studies show that the proposed codebook can de-randomize the phase distortions induced by the hand and coherently combine the energy across antenna elements and thus help in mitigating hand blockage losses.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Hand and Body Blockage Measurements with Form-Factor User Equipment at 28 GHz

Blockage by the human hand/body is an important impairment in realizing practical millimeter wave wireless systems. Prior works on blockage modeling are either based on theoretical studies of double knife edge diffraction or its modifications, high-frequency simulations of electromagnetic effects, or measurements with experimental millimeter wave prototypes. While such studies are useful, they do not capture the form-factor constraints of user equipments (UEs). In this work, we study the impact of hand/body blockage with a UE at $28$ GHz built on Qualcomm's millimeter wave modem, antenna modules and beamforming solutions. We report five exhaustive and controlled studies with different types of hand holdings/grips, antenna types, and with directional/narrow beams. For both hard as well as loose hand grips, we report considerably lower blockage loss estimates than prior works. Critical in estimating the loss is the definition of a "region of interest" (RoI) around the UE where the impact of the hand/body is seen. Towards this goal, we define a RoI that includes the spatial area where significant energy is seen in either the no blockage or blockage modes. Our studies show that significant spatial area coverage improvement can be seen with loose hand grip due to hand reflections.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Antenna Placement and Performance Tradeoffs with Hand Blockage in Millimeter Wave Systems

The ongoing commercial deployment of millimeter wave systems brings into focus a number of practical issues in form factor user equipment (UE) design. With wavelengths becoming smaller, antenna gain patterns becoming directional, and link budgets critically dependent on beamforming, it becomes imperative to use a number of antenna modules at different locations of the UE for good performance. While more antennas/modules can enhance beamforming array gains, it comes with the tradeoff of higher component cost, power consumption of the associated radio frequency circuitry, and a beam management overhead in learning the appropriate beam weights. Thus, the goal of a good UE design is to provide robust spherical coverage corresponding to good array gains over the entire sphere around the UE with a low beam management overhead, complexity, and cost. The scope of this paper is to study the implications of two popular commercial millimeter wave UE designs (a face and an edge design) on spherical coverage. We show that analog beam codebooks can result in good performance for both the designs, and the edge design provides a better tradeoff in terms of robust performance (with hand blockage), beam management overhead, implementation complexity from an antenna placement standpoint and cost.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2019

Evolution of Physical-Layer Communications Research in the Post-5G Era

The evolving Fifth Generation New Radio (5G-NR) cellular standardization efforts at the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) brings into focus a number of questions on relevant research problems in physical-layer communications for study by both academia and industry. To address this question, we show that the peak download data rates for both WiFi and cellular systems have been scaling exponentially with time over the last twenty five years. While keeping up with the historic cellular trends will be possible in the near-term with a modest bandwidth and hardware complexity expansion, even a reasonable stretching of this road-map into the far future would require significant bandwidth accretion, perhaps possible at the millimeter wave, sub-millimeter wave, or Terahertz (THz) regimes. The consequent increase in focus on systems at higher carrier frequencies necessitates a paradigm shift from the reuse of over-simplified (yet mathematically elegant) models, often inherited from sub-6 GHz systems, to a more holistic view where real measurements guide, motivate and refine the building of relevant but possibly complicated models, solution space(s), and good solutions. To motivate the need for this shift, we illustrate how the traditional abstraction fails to correctly estimate the delay spread of millimeter wave wireless channels and hand blockage losses at higher carrier frequencies. We conclude this paper with a broad set of implications for future research prospects at the physical-layer including key use-cases, possible research policy initiatives, and structural changes needed in telecommunications departments at universities.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Channel Reconstruction-Based Hybrid Precoding for Millimeter Wave Multi-User MIMO Systems

The focus of this paper is on multi-user MIMO transmissions for millimeter wave systems with a hybrid precoding architecture at the base-station. To enable multi-user transmissions, the base-station uses a cell-specific codebook of beamforming vectors over an initial beam alignment phase. Each user uses a user-specific codebook of beamforming vectors to learn the top-P (where P >= 1) beam pairs in terms of the observed SNR in a single-user setting. The top-P beam indices along with their SNRs are fed back from each user and the base-station leverages this information to generate beam weights for simultaneous transmissions. A typical method to generate the beam weights is to use only the best beam for each user and either steer energy along this beam, or to utilize this information to reduce multi-user interference. The other beams are used as fall back options to address blockage or mobility. Such an approach completely discards information learned about the channel condition(s) even though each user feeds back this information. With this background, this work develops an advanced directional precoding structure for simultaneous transmissions at the cost of an additional marginal feedback overhead. This construction relies on three main innovations: 1) Additional feedback to allow the base-station to reconstruct a rank-P approximation of the channel matrix between it and each user, 2) A zeroforcing structure that leverages this information to combat multi-user interference by remaining agnostic of the receiver beam knowledge in the precoder design, and 3) A hybrid precoding architecture that allows both amplitude and phase control at low-complexity and cost to allow the implementation of the zeroforcing structure. Numerical studies show that the proposed scheme results in a significant sum rate performance improvement over naive schemes even with a coarse initial beam alignment codebook.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Statistical Blockage Modeling and Robustness of Beamforming in Millimeter Wave Systems

There has been a growing interest in the commercialization of millimeter wave (mmW) technology as a part of the Fifth-Generation New Radio (5G-NR) wireless standardization efforts. In this direction, many sets of independent measurement campaigns show that wireless propagation at mmW carrier frequencies is only marginally worse than propagation at sub-6 GHz carrier frequencies for small-cell coverage --- one of the most important use-cases for 5G-NR. On the other hand, the biggest determinants of viability of mmW systems in practice are penetration and blockage of mmW signals through different materials in the scattering environment. With this background, the focus of this paper is on understanding the impact of blockage of mmW signals and reduced spatial coverage due to penetration through the human hand, body, vehicles, etc. Leveraging measurements with a 28 GHz mmW experimental prototype and electromagnetic simulation studies, we first propose statistical blockage models to capture the impact of the hand, human body and vehicles. We then study the time-scales at which mmW signals are disrupted by blockage (hand and human body). Our results show that these events can be attributed to physical movements and the time-scales corresponding to blockage are hence on the order of a few 100 ms or more. Building on this fundamental understanding, we finally consider the broader question of robustness of mmW beamforming to handle blockage. Network densification, subarray switching in a user equipment (UE) designed with multiple subarrays, fall back mechanisms such as codebook enhancements and switching to legacy carriers in non-standalone deployments, etc. can address blockage before it leads to a deleterious impact on the mmW link margin.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Millimeter Wave MIMO Prototype: Measurements and Experimental Results

Millimeter-wave multi-input multi-output (mm-Wave MIMO) systems are one of the candidate schemes for 5G wireless standardization efforts. In this context, the main contributions of this article are three-fold. 1) We describe parallel sets of measurements at identical transmit-receive location pairs with 2.9, 29 and 61 GHz carrier frequencies in indoor office, shopping mall, and outdoor settings. These measurements provide insights on propagation, blockage and material penetration losses, and the key elements necessary in system design to make mm-Wave systems viable in practice. 2) One of these elements is hybrid beamforming necessary for better link margins by reaping the array gain with large antenna dimensions. From the class of fully-flexible hybrid beamformers, we describe a robust class of directional beamformers towards meeting the high data-rate requirements of mm-Wave systems. 3) Leveraging these design insights, we then describe an experimental prototype system at 28 GHz that realizes high data-rates on both the downlink and uplink and robustly maintains these rates in outdoor and indoor mobility scenarios. In addition to maintaining large signal constellation sizes in spite of radio frequency challenges, this prototype leverages the directional nature of the mm-Wave channel to perform seamless beam switching and handover across mm-Wave base-stations thereby overcoming the path losses in non-line-of-sight links and blockages encountered at mm-Wave frequencies.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Millimeter Wave Channel Measurements and Implications for PHY Layer Design

There has been an increasing interest in the millimeter wave (mmW) frequency regime in the design of next-generation wireless systems. The focus of this work is on understanding mmW channel properties that have an important bearing on the feasibility of mmW systems in practice and have a significant impact on physical (PHY) layer design. In this direction, simultaneous channel sounding measurements at 2.9, 29 and 61 GHz are performed at a number of transmit-receive location pairs in indoor office, shopping mall and outdoor environments. Based on these measurements, this paper first studies large-scale properties such as path loss and delay spread across different carrier frequencies in these scenarios. Towards the goal of understanding the feasibility of outdoor-to-indoor coverage, material measurements corresponding to mmW reflection and penetration are studied and significant notches in signal reception spread over a few GHz are reported. Finally, implications of these measurements on system design are discussed and multiple solutions are proposed to overcome these impairments.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Noisy Beam Alignment Techniques for Reciprocal MIMO Channels

Future multi-input multi-output (MIMO) wireless communications systems will use beamforming as a first-step towards realizing the capacity requirements necessitated by the exponential increase in data demands. The focus of this work is on beam alignment for time-division duplexing (TDD) systems, for which we propose a number of novel algorithms. These algorithms seek to obtain good estimates of the optimal beamformer/combiner pair (which are the dominant singular vectors of the channel matrix). They are motivated by the power method, an iterative algorithm to determine eigenvalues and eigenvectors through repeated matrix multiplication. In contrast to the basic power method which considers only the most recent iteration and assumes noiseless links, the proposed techniques consider information from all the previous iterations of the algorithm and combine them in different ways. The first technique (Sequential Least-Squares method) sequentially constructs a least-squares estimate of the channel matrix, which is then used to calculate the beamformer/combiner pair estimate. The second technique (Summed Power method) aims to mitigate the effect of noise by using a linear combination of the previously tried beams to calculate the next beam, providing improved performance in the low-SNR regime (typical for mmWave systems) with minimal complexity/feedback overhead. A third technique (Least-Squares Initialized Summed Power method) combines the good performance of the first technique at the high-SNR regime with the low-complexity advantage of the second technique by priming the summed power method with initial estimates from the sequential method.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Comparative Performance Analysis of the Cumulative Sum Chart and the Shiryaev-Roberts Procedure for Detecting Changes in Autocorrelated Data

We consider the problem of quickest change-point detection where the observations form a first-order autoregressive (AR) process driven by temporally independent standard Gaussian noise. Subject to possible change are both the drift of the AR(1) process ($μ$) as well as its correlation coefficient ($λ$), both known. The change is abrupt and persistent, and is of known magnitude, with $\vertλ\vert<1$ throughout. For this scenario, we carry out a comparative performance analysis of the popular Cumulative Sum (CUSUM) chart and its less well-known but worthy competitor -- the Shiryaev-Roberts (SR) procedure. Specifically, the performance is measured through Pollak's Supremum (conditional) Average Delay to Detection (SADD) constrained to a pre-specified level of the Average Run Length (ARL) to false alarm. Particular attention is drawn to the sensitivity of each procedure's SADD and ARL with respect to the value of $λ$ before and after the change. The performance is studied through the solution of the respective integral renewal equations obtained via Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations are designed to estimate the sought performance metrics in an unbiased and asymptotically strongly consistent manner, and to within a prescribed proportional closeness (also asymptotically). Our extensive numerical studies suggest that both the CUSUM chart and the SR procedure are asymptotically second-order optimal, even though the CUSUM chart is found to be slightly better than the SR procedure, irrespective of the model parameters. Moreover, the existence of a worst-case post-change correlation parameter corresponding to the poorest detectability of the change for a given ARL to false alarm is established as well. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the performance of the SR procedure is studied for autocorrelated data.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2016

Tracking Changes in Resilience and Level of Coordination in Terrorist Groups

Activity profiles of terrorist groups show frequent spurts and downfalls corresponding to changes in the underlying organizational dynamics. In particular, it is of interest in understanding changes in attributes such as intentions/ideology, tactics/strategies, capabilities/resources, etc., that influence and impact the activity. The goal of this work is the quick detection of such changes and in general, tracking of macroscopic as well as microscopic trends in group dynamics. Prior work in this area are based on parametric approaches and rely on time-series analysis techniques, self-exciting hurdle models (SEHM), or hidden Markov models (HMM). While these approaches detect spurts and downfalls reasonably accurately, they are all based on model learning --- a task that is difficult in practice because of the "rare" nature of terrorist attacks from a model learning perspective. In this paper, we pursue an alternate non-parametric approach for spurt detection in activity profiles. Our approach is based on binning the count data of terrorist activity to form observation vectors that can be compared with each other. Motivated by a majorization theory framework, these vectors are then transformed via certain functionals and used in spurt classification. While the parametric approaches often result in either a large number of missed detections of real changes or false alarms of unoccurred changes, the proposed approach is shown to result in a small number of missed detections and false alarms. Further, the non-parametric nature of the approach makes it attractive for ready applications in a practical context.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2016

Beamforming Tradeoffs for Initial UE Discovery in Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

Millimeter-wave MIMO systems have gained increasing traction towards the goal of meeting the high data-rate requirements in next-generation wireless systems. The focus of this work is on low-complexity beamforming approaches for initial UE discovery in such systems. Towards this goal, we first note the structure of the optimal beamformer with per-antenna gain and phase control and the structure of good beamformers with per-antenna phase-only control. Learning these beamforming structures in mmW systems is fraught with considerable complexities such as the need for a non-broadcast system design, the sensitivity of the beamformer approximants to small path length changes, etc. To overcome these issues, we establish a physical interpretation between these beamformer structures and the angles of departure/arrival of the dominant path(s). This physical interpretation provides a theoretical underpinning to the emerging interest on directional beamforming approaches that are less sensitive to small path length changes. While classical approaches for direction learning such as MUSIC have been well-understood, they suffer from many practical difficulties in a mmW context such as a non-broadcast system design and high computational complexity. A simpler broadcast solution for mmW systems is the adaptation of directional codebooks for beamforming at the two ends. We establish fundamental limits for the best beam broadening codebooks and propose a construction motivated by a virtual subarray architecture that is within a couple of dB of the best tradeoff curve at all useful beam broadening factors. We finally provide the received SNR loss-UE discovery latency tradeoff with the proposed constructions. Our results show that users with a reasonable link margin can be quickly discovered by the proposed design with a smooth roll-off in performance as the link margin deteriorates.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2016

Directional Beamforming for Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

The focus of this paper is on beamforming in a millimeter-wave (mmW) multi-input multi-output (MIMO) setup that has gained increasing traction in meeting the high data-rate requirements of next-generation wireless systems. For a given MIMO channel matrix, the optimality of beamforming with the dominant right-singular vector (RSV) at the transmit end and with the matched filter to the RSV at the receive end has been well-understood. When the channel matrix can be accurately captured by a physical (geometric) scattering model across multiple clusters/paths as is the case in mmW MIMO systems, we provide a physical interpretation for this optimal structure: beam steering across the different paths with appropriate power allocation and phase compensation. While such an explicit physical interpretation has not been provided hitherto, practical implementation of such a structure in a mmW system is fraught with considerable difficulties (complexity as well as cost) as it requires the use of per-antenna gain and phase control. This paper characterizes the loss in received SNR with an alternate low-complexity beamforming solution that needs only per-antenna phase control and corresponds to steering the beam to the dominant path at the transmit and receive ends. While the loss in received SNR can be arbitrarily large (theoretically), this loss is minimal in a large fraction of the channel realizations reinforcing the utility of directional beamforming as a good candidate solution for mmW MIMO systems.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2014

Hidden Markov models for the activity profile of terrorist groups

The main focus of this work is on developing models for the activity profile of a terrorist group, detecting sudden spurts and downfalls in this profile, and, in general, tracking it over a period of time. Toward this goal, a $d$-state hidden Markov model (HMM) that captures the latent states underlying the dynamics of the group and thus its activity profile is developed. The simplest setting of $d=2$ corresponds to the case where the dynamics are coarsely quantized as Active and Inactive, respectively. A state estimation strategy that exploits the underlying HMM structure is then developed for spurt detection and tracking. This strategy is shown to track even nonpersistent changes that last only for a short duration at the cost of learning the underlying model. Case studies with real terrorism data from open-source databases are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2013

Modeling Temporal Activity Patterns in Dynamic Social Networks

The focus of this work is on developing probabilistic models for user activity in social networks by incorporating the social network influence as perceived by the user. For this, we propose a coupled Hidden Markov Model, where each user's activity evolves according to a Markov chain with a hidden state that is influenced by the collective activity of the friends of the user. We develop generalized Baum-Welch and Viterbi algorithms for model parameter learning and state estimation for the proposed framework. We then validate the proposed model using a significant corpus of user activity on Twitter. Our numerical studies show that with sufficient observations to ensure accurate model learning, the proposed framework explains the observed data better than either a renewal process-based model or a conventional uncoupled Hidden Markov Model. We also demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach in predicting the time to the next tweet. Finally, clustering in the model parameter space is shown to result in distinct natural clusters of users characterized by the interaction dynamic between a user and his network.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2012

Ensemble Properties of RVQ-Based Limited-Feedback Beamforming Codebooks

The ensemble properties of Random Vector Quantization (RVQ) codebooks for limited-feedback beamforming in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems are studied with the metrics of interest being the received SNR loss and mutual information loss, both relative to a perfect channel state information (CSI) benchmark. The simplest case of unskewed codebooks is studied in the correlated MIMO setting and these loss metrics are computed as a function of the number of bits of feedback ($B$), transmit antenna dimension ($N_t$), and spatial correlation. In particular, it is established that: i) the loss metrics are a product of two components -- a quantization component and a channel-dependent component; ii) the quantization component, which is also common to analysis of channels with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) fading, decays as $B$ increases at the rate $2^{-B/(N_t-1)}$; iii) the channel-dependent component reflects the condition number of the channel. Further, the precise connection between the received SNR loss and the squared singular values of the channel is shown to be a Schur-convex majorization relationship. Finally, the ensemble properties of skewed codebooks that are generated by skewing RVQ codebooks with an appropriately designed fixed skewing matrix are studied. Based on an estimate of the loss expression for skewed codebooks, it is established that the optimal skewing matrix is critically dependent on the condition numbers of the effective channel (product of the true channel and the skewing matrix) and the skewing matrix.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2011

Statistical Beamforming on the Grassmann Manifold for the Two-User Broadcast Channel

A Rayleigh fading spatially correlated broadcast setting with M = 2 antennas at the transmitter and two-users (each with a single antenna) is considered. It is assumed that the users have perfect channel information about their links whereas the transmitter has only statistical information of each user's link (covariance matrix of the vector channel). A low-complexity linear beamforming strategy that allocates equal power and one spatial eigen-mode to each user is employed at the transmitter. Beamforming vectors on the Grassmann manifold that depend only on statistical information are to be designed at the transmitter to maximize the ergodic sum-rate delivered to the two users. Towards this goal, the beamforming vectors are first fixed and a closed-form expression is obtained for the ergodic sum-rate in terms of the covariance matrices of the links. This expression is non-convex in the beamforming vectors ensuring that the classical Lagrange multiplier technique is not applicable. Despite this difficulty, the optimal solution to this problem is shown to be the solution to the maximization of an appropriately-defined average signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) metric for each user. This solution is the dominant generalized eigenvector of a pair of positive-definite matrices where the first matrix is the covariance matrix of the forward link and the second is an appropriately-designed "effective" interference covariance matrix. In this sense, our work is a generalization of optimal signalling along the dominant eigen-mode of the transmit covariance matrix in the single-user case. Finally, the ergodic sum-rate for the general broadcast setting with M antennas at the transmitter and M-users (each with a single antenna) is obtained in terms of the covariance matrices of the links and the beamforming vectors.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Linear Beamforming for the Spatially Correlated MISO broadcast channel

A spatially correlated broadcast setting with M antennas at the base station and M users (each with a single antenna) is considered. We assume that the users have perfect channel information about their links and the base station has only statistical information about each user's link. The base station employs a linear beamforming strategy with one spatial eigen-mode allocated to each user. The goal of this work is to understand the structure of the beamforming vectors that maximize the ergodic sum-rate achieved by treating interference as noise. In the M = 2 case, we first fix the beamforming vectors and compute the ergodic sum-rate in closed-form as a function of the channel statistics. We then show that the optimal beamforming vectors are the dominant generalized eigenvectors of the covariance matrices of the two links. It is difficult to obtain intuition on the structure of the optimal beamforming vectors for M > 2 due to the complicated nature of the sum-rate expression. Nevertheless, in the case of asymptotic M, we show that the optimal beamforming vectors have to satisfy a set of fixed-point equations.

cs.IT↗