Ralf R. Müller

Prof. Dr. Ralf R. Müller

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Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

12Years (2015-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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29 December 2020 in IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
VJVahid Jamali
Vahid Jamali
ATAntonia M. Tulino
Antonia M. Tulino
Georg FischerGeorg Fischer
Georg Fischer
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
RSRobert Schober
Robert Schober
In this article, we study two novel massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter architectures for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications which comprise few active antennas, each equipped with a dedicated radio frequency (RF) chain, that illuminate a nearby large intelligent reflecting/transmitting surface (IRS/ITS). The IRS (ITS) consists of a large number of low-cost and energy-efficient passive antenna elements which are able to reflect (transmit) a phase-shifted version of the incident electromagnetic field. Similar to lens array (LA) antennas, IRS/ITS-aided antenna architectures are energy efficient due to the almost lossless over-the-air connection between the active antennas and the intelligent surface. However, unlike for LA antennas, for which the number of active antennas has to linearly grow with the number of passive elements (i.e., the lens aperture) due to the non-reconfigurablility (i.e., non-intelligence) of the lens, for IRS/ITS-aided antennas, the reconfigurablility of the IRS/ITS facilitates scaling up the number of radiating passive elements without increasing the number of costly and bulky active antennas. We show that the constraints that the precoders for IRS/ITS-aided antennas have to meet differ from those of conventional MIMO architectures. Taking these constraints into account and exploiting the sparsity of mmWave channels, we design two efficient precoders; one based on maximizing the mutual information and one based on approximating the optimal unconstrained fully digital (FD) precoder via the orthogonal matching pursuit algorithm. Furthermore, we develop a power consumption model for IRS/ITS-aided antennas that takes into account the impacts of the IRS/ITS imperfections, namely the spillover loss, taper loss, aperture loss, and phase shifter loss. Moreover, we study the effect that the various system parameters have on the achievable rate and show that a proper positioning of the active antennas with respect to the IRS/ITS leads to a considerable performance improvement. Our simulation results reveal that unlike conventional MIMO architectures, IRS/ITS-aided antennas are both highly energy efficient and fully scalable in terms of the number of transmitting (passive) antennas. Therefore, IRS/ITS-aided antennas are promising candidates for realizing the potential of mmWave ultra massive MIMO communications in practice.

1 November 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
SASaba Asaad
Saba Asaad
ARAmir Masoud Rabiei
Amir Masoud Rabiei
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
Antenna selection is an effective means to address the cost and complexity issues in massive MIMO systems. This paper studies the performance limits of massive MIMO systems under practical antenna selection algorithms. A massive MIMO system is considered in which the transmitter employs only a fixed-size subset of the available antennas with the strongest channel gains. For this setup, the input-output mutual information of the system is shown to be well-approximated by a normal random variable when the number of transmit antennas is large. The mean of this random variable grows proportional to the number of antennas and its variance vanishes in the large-system limit. This behavior of the mutual information generalizes the wellknown channel hardening property in massive MIMO systems to the cases with antenna selection. Our investigations show that 90% of the ergodic rate achieved by full antenna selection can be achieved by selecting less than 30% of the transmit antennas. Using large-system analysis, we drive an analytical expression for the number of selected antennas that maximizes the energy efficiency. This number is also derived for the case where a certain fraction of the totally achievable rate is aimed to be achieved. Our numerical investigations demonstrate a close match between analytical and simulation results even for scenarios with not so large dimensions.

14 March 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
SASaba Asaad
Saba Asaad
YWYifei Wu
Yifei Wu
Ali BereyhiAli Bereyhi
Ali Bereyhi
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
RSRafael F. Schaefer
Rafael F. Schaefer
H. Vincent PoorH. Vincent Poor
H. Vincent Poor
In intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the IRS can be utilized to suppress the information leakage towards malicious terminals. This can lead to significant secrecy gains. This work exploits these gains via a tractable joint design of downlink beamformers and IRS phase-shifts. In this respect, we consider a generic IRS-aided MIMO wiretap setting and invoke fractional programming and alternating optimization to iteratively find the beamformers and phase-shifts that maximize the achievable weighted secrecy sum-rate. Our design is comprised of two low-complexity algorithms. Performance of the proposed algorithms are numerically evaluated and compared to the benchmark. The results reveal that integrating IRSs into MIMO systems not only boosts the secrecy performance, but also improves the robustness against passive eavesdropping.

26 August 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Ali BereyhiAli Bereyhi
Ali Bereyhi
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
HSHermann Schulz-Baldes
Hermann Schulz-Baldes
The large-system performance of maximum-a-poste-rior estimation is studied considering a general distortion function when the observation vector is received through a linear system with additive white Gaussian noise. The analysis considers the system matrix to be chosen from the large class of rotationally invariant random matrices. We take a statistical mechanical approach by introducing a spin glass corresponding to the estimator, and employing the replica method for the large-system analysis. In contrast to earlier replica based studies, our analysis evaluates the general replica ansatz of the corresponding spin glass and determines the asymptotic distortion of the estimator for any structure of the replica correlation matrix. Consequently, the replica symmetric as well as the replica symmetry breaking ansatz with b steps of breaking is deduced from the given general replica ansatz. The generality of our distortion function lets us derive a more general form of the maximum-a-posterior decoupling principle. Based on the general replica ansatz, we show that for any structure of the replica correlation matrix, the vector-valued system decouples into a bank of equivalent decoupled scalar systems followed by maximum-a-posterior estimators. The structure of the decoupled system is further studied under both the replica symmetry and the replica symmetry breaking assumptions. For b steps of symmetry breaking, the decoupled system is found to be an additive system with a non-Gaussian noise term given as the sum of an independent Gaussian random variable with b non-Gaussian impairment terms which depend on the input symbol. The general decoupling property of the maximum-a-posterior estimator leads to the idea of a replica simulator which represents the replica ansatz through the state evolution of a transition system described by its corresponding decoupled system. As an application of our study, we investigate large compressive sensing systems by considering the ℓp norm minimization recovery schemes. Our numerical investigations show that the replica symmetric ansatz for ℓ0 norm recovery fails to give an accurate approximation of the mean square error as the compression rate grows, and therefore, the replica symmetry breaking ansätze are needed in order to assess the performance precisely.

3 July 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Ali BereyhiAli Bereyhi
Ali Bereyhi
MSMohammad Ali Sedaghat
Mohammad Ali Sedaghat
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
Georg FischerGeorg Fischer
Georg Fischer
This paper proposes the class of generalized least-square-error (GLSE) precoders for multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. For a generic transmit constellation, the GLSE precoders minimize the interference at user terminals assuring that some given constraints on the transmit signals are satisfied. The general form of these precoders enables us to impose multiple restrictions at the transmit signal, such as limited peak power and restricted number of active transmit antennas. The performance of these precoders is analyzed in the large-system limit. It is shown that the output symbols are identically distributed, and their statistics are described with an equivalent scalar GLSE precoder. To demonstrate the applications of the proposed framework, we employ the GLSE precoding to form transmit signals over a discrete alphabet and to select an effective subset of transmit antennas. Our investigations show that a computationally efficient GLSE precoder requires 41% less active transmit antennas than the conventional selection protocols in order to achieve a given level of input-output distortion.

8 June 2023 in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Ali BereyhiAli Bereyhi
Ali Bereyhi
AVAdela Vagollari
Adela Vagollari
SASaba Asaad
Saba Asaad
RMRalf R. Müller
Ralf R. Müller
WGWolfgang Gerstacker
Wolfgang Gerstacker
H. Vincent PoorH. Vincent Poor
H. Vincent Poor
This paper develops a class of low-complexity device scheduling algorithms for over-the-air federated learning via the method of matching pursuit. The proposed scheme tracks closely the close-to-optimal performance achieved by difference-of-convex programming, and outperforms significantly the well-known benchmark algorithms based on convex relaxation. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed scheme imposes a drastically lower computational load on the system: for $K$ devices and $N$ antennas at the parameter server, the benchmark complexity scales with $(N^{2}+K)^{3} + N^{6}$ while the complexity of the proposed scheme scales with ${K^{p} N^{q}}$ for some $0 \lt p,q \leq 2$ . The efficiency of the proposed scheme is confirmed through the convergence analysis and numerical experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset.