Angle Estimation for Terahertz Ultra-Massive MIMO-Based Space-to-Air Communications

TLDR: In this article, a grouping true-time delay unit module was designed to mitigate the impact of delay-beam squint effects to establish the space-to-air THz link.

Abstract: This paper investigates terahertz ultra-massive (UM)-MIMO-based angle estimation for space-to-air communications, which can solve the performance degradation problem caused by the dual delay-beam squint effects of terahertz UM-MIMO channels. Specifically, we first design a grouping true-time delay unit module that can significantly mitigate the impact of delay-beam squint effects to establish the space-to-air THz link. Based on the subarray selection scheme, the UM hybrid array can be equivalently considered as a low-dimensional fully-digital array, and then the fine estimates of azimuth/elevation angles at both UAVs and satellite can be separately acquired using the proposed prior-aided iterative angle estimation algorithm. The simulation results that close to Cramer-Rao lower bounds verify the effectiveness of our solution.