Title:  Scalable Wideband Closed-Loop Beam-Former Receiver Array for Full-FoV Instinctual and Autonomous Unknown Blocker Rejection and Signal Tracking

Committee: 

Dr. Wang, Advisor

Dr. Swaminathan, Chair

Dr. Chang

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is to create a first-ever MIMO system that achieves low-latency and instinctual multiple signal/blocker management for future mm-Wave communications/ fiber-wireless networks. To support future mm-Wave wireless systems, such as 5G new radio (NR), massive MIMOs leverage large array size to substantially enhance the mm-Wave link budget and spatial selectivity, but their resulting narrow beamwidth drastically complicates the transmitter-receiver (TX-RX) alignment. Unlike existing mm-Wave applications that are mostly in “static” settings, many future mm-Wave links are expected to operate in highly “dynamic” environments, necessitating rapid and precise beam-forming/-tracking to ensure high link reliability and extreme low latency.To address these challenges, this proposal shows a new MIMO receiver array that is the first of its kind to support hybrid beam-forming, achieving autonomous and dynamic rejection of unknown blockers and beam-forming on unknown desired signals. The proposal demonstrates that the desired signals with wideband modulated 64-/256Q-AM are successfully measured and demodulated after cancelling the in-band/co-channel blockers with the same modulation scheme and modulation rate. The closed-loop DSP-free mm-wave/RF front-end beam-former also achieves rapid response time of < 1µs per beam-former stage, which is 100× ~ 1000× faster than the state-of-the-art mm-wave/analog/digital beam-formers using baseband DSP signal processing for beam-finding. This is the first proposed MIMO system for achieving autonomous wideband modulated 64-/256-QAM blocker rejection and signal beam-forming with ultra-low-latency µs response time.