Abstract

5G new radio (NR) provides enhanced transmission capabilities to transceivers by utilizing the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology with a significantly increased number of antenna elements. Such transmission requires massive arrays to perform accurate high-gain beamforming over the millimeter-wave frequency band. There is no fixed form of array structures for 5G NR base stations, but they are likely to include multiple subarrays or panels for practicality of implementation and are expected to cover the user equipment (UE) in various locations. In this paper, we propose an array structure to transmit signals over the three-dimensional (3D) space in an isotropic fashion for all types of UEs in ground, aerial, and high-rise building locations, by employing panels on surfaces of a polyhedron. We further derive exact beamforming equations for the proposed array and show the resulting beams provide improved receiver performance over the exiting conventional beamforming. The presented beamforming expressions can be applied to an arbitrary multipanel array with massive antenna elements.

Highlights

  • A massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology enables signal transmission to multiple users at increased bandwidth efficiency, resulting in higher system capacity [1,2,3,4]

  • In 5G new radio (NR), the frequency band extends to the millimeter-wave to accommodate increased traffic over a larger bandwidth

  • Characteristics of the millimeterwave frequency band are important in designing transceivers and beamforming strategies, and related study has been conducted to attract a great amount of attention [4,5,6]

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Summary

Introduction

A massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology enables signal transmission to multiple users at increased bandwidth efficiency, resulting in higher system capacity [1,2,3,4]. Shorter wavelengths of millimeterwave carriers reduce the size of each antenna element, making the utilization of arrays with a larger number of antenna elements practically feasible Using such arrays, improved beamforming and beam management schemes can be performed [7]. Full digital beamforming via baseband precoding provides accurate and controllable management of signal beams, it requires a separate RF chain to be connected to each antenna element which makes the array larger in size and more expensive to build To overcome this problem, hybrid beamforming using analog beamforming to steer beams to the target direction for each subarray in addition to the digital precoding has been proposed [11, 12]. An ultimate form of 3D arrays would be in spherical shape, such arrays do incur implementation complexity but cause difficulty to include subarrays They make the utilization of existing beamformers and codebooks difficult.

System Model
Coordinate Transformation
Subarray Beamforming
Evaluation
Conclusions

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