Distributed Millimeter-wave Cooperative Beam Forming Arrays
Abstract
This project seeks to enable distributed cooperative beam forming radio transceivers(transmitter and receiver) by enabling high pre cision and low latency time transfer required for theoperation of these systems. By creative circuit and system architectures, we a im to break thepresent limitations to achieve breakthrough improvements with less than 10 psec time transferaccuracy and with sec level synchronization latency.Radio transceivers in these types of arrays are distributed spatially and are coherentlycooperating to form a constructive electronically- steerable beam at the destination, in analogy totraditional phased array systems. Coherent operation and spatial distribution provide severaladvantages for of distributed array systems (DAS) compared to single radio aditional phasedarray systems. Realtime awareness, enhanced spatial coverage, enhanced communication dynamicrange, improved imagin g resolution, localization accuracy, and improved reliability ofcommunication and sensing systems are some of the benefits of DAS s ystems. In addition, thesusceptibility of distributed systems to interferers and jamming is significantly lower than standardphase d array systems. DAS systems have found new applications for relative positioning, timing,and distributed computation. Furthermore, distributed array can be implemented with numbers oflow-cost and low-power battery operated radios with significantly reduced cost compared tophased array systems. DAS is poised to revolutionize applications, such as wireless sensornetworks. While the concept of DAS was conceived recently with numerous advantages andapplications, several challenges are yet to be resolved for the practica l realization of these systems.There are two main challenges that are hindering the operation of DAS systems and posefundamental l imitations specially at higher frequencies. First, the low latency and high precisionsynchronization of individual nodes, and secon dly the high precision localization, time-of-flight(ToF) estimation, and phase correction. Most of the reported results rely on sub stantial digitalcomputations with unacceptable high latency, these reports have neglected the imperfections andfundamental limitat ions imposed by the analog front-end and analog-to-digital conversion (ADC),and yet to achieve sub 10-psec precision [1][7].This proposal provides novel approaches to solve the challenges associated withsynchronization, localization and beamforming of distrib uted array transceivers with significantlyreduced latency to ultimately enable the realization of distributed array systems (DAS) u sing lowcostintegrated circuit technology at millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies. By utilizing high-speedsynchronization and phase c orrection in analog domain with novel circuit topologies, and by codesigningwith digital assistance, we aim to break down the trade off between precision and thelatency and enable high-speed simultaneous communication and synchronization, precise timetransfer, a s well as simultaneous synchronization and localization with precise phase correction,and beamforming with significantly reduced la tency.This project if successful, can enable the realization of DAS systems with major impact onenhancing the performance of commu nication, sensing, and ranging systems used by DoD. Theproposed theories will be proved by analysis, modeling, simulations and ulti mately throughexperiments. Custom chip-scale implementation will be used to prove the proposed conceptsexperimentally. This will m ark the first realization of distributed beamforming array systems in alow-cost integrated circuit platform at millimeter-wave freq uencies.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 07, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112897
Entities
People
- Saeed Zeinolabedinzadeh
Organizations
- Arizona State University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy