Allyson McKinney

Title: Covariant Huygens Fresnel beamforming: A computationally efficient, near-field, location-based beamforming technique for data transmission

Time: Friday, Feb 24th, 3:00 PM
Location: CSIP library (room 5126), 5th floor, Centergy one building

Bio

Allyson is a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is currently working in the Barnes lab developing Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) techniques for FutureG. Allysonpreviously worked at the Georgia Tech Research Institute developing signal processing techniques for military radars. She received her MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and her BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Auburn University.

Abstract

With the ever-expanding demand for increased data transmission, the mobile telecommunication industry is ever in search of ways to achieve higher channel capacity and better spectral efficiency to service more users on a limited spectrum. One of the proposed solutions is Spatial Division Multiple Access (SDMA) through digital beamforming (DBF) on transmit. The objective of this talk is to demonstrate a computationally efficient, near-field, location-based beamforming technique for data transmission. The CHF beamformer creates an incident wavefield at a desired location not through an angular assumption or channel inversion. Rather, the CHF beamformer’s transmitted wavefield is determined by using the covariant Huygens-Fresnel wave model of an emitter, located at the desired location of the user, which is time reversed to recreate the spatial focused incident wavefield at the emitter’s location. Due to the absence of matrix inversion, the CHF beamformer is more computationally efficient than conventional channel inversion techniques when evaluated on a per beam basis. Due to CHF’s covariant Huygens-Fresnel spherical wave model, as opposed to a directed plane wave, the CHF was designed for both near-field and far-field capabilities, unlike Fraunhofer location-based techniques. The performance of the CHF beamformer is analyzed through simulations that evaluate design parameters and tolerance to noisy environments. The simulations serve as a proof of concept of the CHF beamformer and demonstrate the performance of the CHF beamformer as a transmission technique, through the quantification of bit error rate, under different scenarios (i.e., white Gaussian noise, multiuser interference). These results demonstrated that the CHF beamformer maintains high utility, even in servicing multiple users if they are spaced according to Rayleigh distance. The impact of this new approach is highlighted at the conclusion of this talk by comparing current beamformers performance with the performance of the CHF beamformer.

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