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Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO: A Wireless Backbone for Smart Cities

ECE General Seminars Seminar

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Location: EER 0.904 (Mulva Auditorium)
Speaker:
Maryam Eslami Rasekh
University of California Santa Barbara

The rise of millimeter wave frequencies – sparked by unlicensing of large swaths of spectrum two decades ago – is posed to significantly reshape the wireless landscape. For mobile networks, a throughput boost of >1000x is promised through “picocellular” architectures and vigorous spatial reuse, while physically small yet electronically large antenna arrays raise the bar for what is possible in terms of sensing and environmental awareness. Incorporating these capabilities in the next-generation of urban wireless infrastructure entails large scale deployment of massive MIMO frontends for backhaul relaying, multi-user multiplexing, localization, and sensing. It is therefore imperative to develop highly scalable, low-power, and cost-efficient frontend designs tailored for each application, as well as scalable signal processing solutions that can handle the high dimensionality with low overhead and delay. 

In the first half of my talk, I discuss how compressive signal processing techniques may be used to exploit the inherent sparsity of MIMO channels for scalable channel tracking and radar sensing, and how these techniques can be adapted to simplified frontends and limited synchronization. In the second half, I will cover our collaborative efforts toward developing scalable MIMO frontends. I will discuss how adopting a “modular” architecture can simplify hardware scaling for all-digital frontends and ease requirements such as oscillator phase noise. In RF-beamformed phased arrays, we show that per-channel power consumption can be slashed by an order of magnitude by adopting a highly simplified on-off architecture, and quantify the inherent power-utilization tradeoffs that arise in this and other low-resolution beamforming architectures.

Rasekh.Maryam

Maryam Eslami Rasekh received her BS and MS from Isfahan University of Technology and Sharif University of Technology, Iran. She completed her PhD at University of California Santa Barbara in 2020 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Wireless Communications and Sensornets Laboratory at UCSB, working with Prof. Upamanyu Madhow. Her research is mainly focused on the development of scalable massive MIMO frontends and signal processing techniques, as well as networking and cross-layer design tools for the next generation of wireless communication and sensing applications, primarily at millimeter-wave and THz frequencies.

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