Massive hybrid antenna array for millimeter-wave cellular communications

© 2002-2012 IEEE. A massive hybrid array consists of multiple analog subarrays, with each subarray having its digital processing chain. It offers the potential advantage of balancing cost and performance for massive arrays and therefore serves as an attractive solution for future millimeter-wave (mm- Wave) cellular communications. On one hand, using beamforming analog subarrays such as phased arrays, the hybrid configuration can effectively collect or distribute signal energy in sparse mm-Wave channels. On the other hand, multiple digital chains in the configuration provide multiplexing capability and more beamforming flexibility to the system. In this article, we discuss several important issues and the state-of-the-art development for mm-Wave hybrid arrays, such as channel modeling, capacity characterization, applications of various smart antenna techniques for single-user and multiuser communications, and practical hardware design. We investigate how the hybrid array architecture and special mm-Wave channel property can be exploited to design suboptimal but practical massive antenna array schemes. We also compare two main types of hybrid arrays, interleaved and localized arrays, and recommend that the localized array is a better option in terms of overall performance and hardware feasibility

Performance evaluation of 5G millimeter-wave cellular access networks using a capacity-based network deployment tool

The next fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication networks comes with a set of new features to satisfy the demand of data-intensive applications: millimeter-wave frequencies, massive antenna arrays, beamforming, dense cells, and so forth. In this paper, we investigate the use of beamforming techniques through various architectures and evaluate the performance of 5G wireless access networks, using a capacity-based network deployment tool. This tool is proposed and applied to a realistic area in Ghent, Belgium, to simulate realistic 5G networks that respond to the instantaneous bit rate required by the active users. The results show that, with beamforming, 5G networks require almost 15% more base stations and 4 times less power to provide more capacity to the users and the same coverage performances, in comparison with the 4G reference network. Moreover, they are 3 times more energy efficient than the 4G network and the hybrid beamforming architecture appears to be a suitable architecture for beamforming to be considered when designing a 5G cellular network

Doubly Massive mmWave MIMO Systems: Using Very Large Antenna Arrays at Both Transmitter and Receiver

One of the key features of next generation wireless communication systems will be the use of frequencies in the range 10-100GHz (aka mmWave band) in densely populated indoor and outdoor scenarios. Due to the reduced wavelength, antenna arrays with a large number of antennas can be packed in very small volumes, making thus it possible to consider, at least in principle, communication links wherein not only the base-station, but also the user device, are equipped with very large antenna arrays. We denote this configuration as a "doubly-massive" MIMO wireless link. This paper introduces the concept of doubly massive MIMO systems at mmWave, showing that at mmWave the fundamentals of the massive MIMO regime are completely different from what happens at conventional sub-6 GHz cellular frequencies. It is shown for instance that the multiplexing capabilities of the channel and its rank are no longer ruled by the number of transmit and receive antennas, but rather by the number of scattering clusters in the surrounding environment. The implications of the doubly massive MIMO regime on the transceiver processing, on the system energy efficiency and on the system throughput are also discussed.Comment: Accepted for presentation at 2016 IEEE GLOBECOM, Washington (DC), USA, December 201