Millidegree-Level Direction-of-Arrival Estimation and Tracking for Terahertz Ultra-Massive MIMO Systems

Terahertz (0.1-10 THz) wireless communications are expected to meet 100+ Gbps data rates for 6G communications. Being able to combat the distance limitation with reduced hardware complexity, ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems with hybrid dynamic array-of-subarrays (DAoSA) beamforming are a promising technology for THz wireless communications. However, fundamental challenges in THz DAoSA systems include millidegree-level three-dimensional direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and millisecond-level beam tracking with reduced pilot overhead. To address these challenges, an off-grid subspace-based DAoSA-MUSIC and a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) methods are proposed for DoA estimation. Furthermore, by exploiting the temporal correlations of the channel variation, an augmented DAoSA-MUSIC-T and a convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) solutions are further developed to realize DoA tracking. Extensive simulations and comparisons on the proposed subspace- and deep-learning-based algorithms are conducted. Results show that both DAoSA-MUSIC and DCNN achieve super-resolution DoA estimation and outperform existing solutions, while DCNN performs better than DAoSA-MUSIC at a high signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, DAoSA-MUSIC-T and ConvLSTM can capture fleeting DoA variation with an accuracy of 0.1° within milliseconds, and reduce 50% pilot overhead. Compared to DAoSA-MUSIC-T, ConvLSTM can tolerate large angle variation and remain robust over a long duration.