Data-Aided Doppler Compensation for High-Speed Railway Communications Over mmWave Bands

Abstract

Millimeter wave communications show great potentials in many applications, one of which is the high-speed railway(HSR) communication system. However, a major challenge is the Doppler effect caused by the relative-movement between the train and the base station (BS), which leads to fast channel variation. To compensate for the Doppler shift, an accurate channel model is indispensable, and the far-field channel model is generally employed, which assumes that the dimensions of the antenna arrays are negligible compared to the distance between transmitter and receiver. This model is widely used in Cellular systems, but the underlining assumption is not always true for railway communication systems. In this paper, the modeling of the Doppler effect for millimeter wave in HSR communications is conducted, and data-aided Doppler estimation and compensation algorithms are designed based on the new model. We show that the conventional far-field channel model is based on the first-order Taylor expansion of the actually channel, and the second-order component cannot be ignored for HSR communications. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the validity of the new model and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.