Recent Breakthroughs on Angle-of-Arrival Estimation for Millimeter-Wave High-Speed Railway Communication

With significantly improved efficiency, largescale hybrid antenna arrays with tens to hundreds of antennas have great potential to support millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication for high-speed railway (HSR) applications. The significant beamforming gains rely on fast and accurate estimation of the angle-of-arrival (AoA), but this can be impeded by the high train speed, the cost/energy oriented design of arrays, and the severe attenuation of mmWave signals. This article reviews these challenges, and discusses the limitations of existing AoA estimation techniques under hybrid antenna array settings. The article further reveals a few recent theoretical breakthroughs that can potentially enable fast and reliable estimation, even based on severely attenuated signals. Under a speed setting of 500 km/h, a performance study is carried out to confirm the significant improvements of estimation accuracy and subsequent beamforming gains as the results of the breakthroughs.