Description
Date depot: 8 février 2024
Titre: Leaky-Wave Antennas for Direction-of-Arrival estimation for future mmWave and (sub-)THz Communications
Directeur de thèse:
Julien SARRAZIN (GeePs (EDITE))
Domaine scientifique: Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication
Thématique CNRS : Signal et communications
Resumé: The next decade is going to witness a profound transformation in the mobile communication infrastructure. The aim of interconnecting everything everywhere unleashes new visions such as autonomous vehicles, factory of the future, and augmented reality. To meet the requirement associated with these new use cases, one key technology is the millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-Terahertz (sub-THz) spectrums. However, operating at such high frequencies remains challenging, especially in mobile scenarios. Indeed, mmWave operation includes a beam training process to align the directional beams radiated by the antennas at the base station and the user equipment. This procedure introduces large overhead signaling as well as latency, especially during initial access, which could jeopardize mmWave effectiveness. So far, beam training relies on the sequential scanning of the beam space, which represents a bottleneck for efficient mobile communications. To address the latency and overhead issues in this beam management, we conduct a radically different approach by envisioning a sensing unit that feedbacks the angular spectrum to the base station in real time. To achieve such a technological breakthrough, we leverage the intrinsic frequency beam scanning behavior of multibeam leaky-wave antennas to perform angle-of-arrival estimation using dedicated algorithms. The PhD will go beyond the state-of-the-art by conducting a transdisciplinary approach combining applied electromagnetics and signal processing. The aim is to extend the cognitive approach of frequency spectrum sensing to the angular spectrum to enable managing the beam space not as a separate resource, but as an extra dimension in the resource grid. This brings the unique opportunity to represent channel resources, not as a 2D grid, but as a time-frequency-beam 3D grid.