Zihan Wei MS Thesis Defense

Name:
Zihan Wei

Title:
Spatial Correlation Based Broadband Acoustic Beamforming

Date:
4/16/2024

Time:
3:00:00 PM

Location:
EXP-601A

Committee Members:
1. Prof. Milica Stojanovic (Advisor)
2. Prof. Stefano Basagni
3. Prof. Josep Jornet

Abstract:
This thesis presents a spatial correlation based broadband acoustic beamforming approach, addressing significant challenges pertains to acoustic communication channels, such as time-varying multipath propagation and volatile phase fluctuations due to surface reflections. The proposed beamforming approach utilizes the synchronization preamble, a high-resolution pseudo-random sequence, to estimate the spatial correlation matrices for each frequency bin and decompose these spatial correlation matrices using singular vector decomposition. The singular vectors are then applied to each carrier of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signals as beamforming weights. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated using simulations and an in-air acoustic communications testbed. Performance metrics such as the mean squared error and bit error rate are presented, demonstrating excellent performance improvement over the angle-based beamforming approach.