Direction of Arrival and Center Frequency Estimation for Impulse Radio Millimeter Wave Communications

The 30-300GHz millimeter wave (mmWave) band is currently being pursued to combat the rising capacity demands in 5G, WiFi, and IoT networks. Due to the high frequency, impulse radio (IR) in this band is better suited for positioning than other existing low-frequency bands. Besides precision positioning, the exceptionally wide bandwidth also enables concurrent use of multiple center frequencies in the same application, which opens up additional avenues of information encoding in IR mmWave networks. In this paper, we propose a new mmWave IR framework that can simultaneously detect direction of arrival (DOA) as well as the center frequency of the transmitted pulse. Based on the emerging graphene-based transceivers, we evaluate the performance of the proposed framework in the higher frequency region of mmWave band (100-300GHz). Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can detect the DOA of a 0.1 uW mmWave pulse within 1 degree of precision at 20 meters, and classify three different center frequencies with 100% accuracy from a distance of 10 meters. These performances could be further improved by trading off the pulse rate of the system.