Dual-Polarized Two-Dimensional Multibeam Antenna Array With Hybrid Beamforming and its Planarization

Lin-Hui He,Fu-Qiang Yan,Gang Wu,Yong-Ling Ban

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3071645

Abstract

A feeding network crossing method is proposed to form an N $\times $ N dual-polarized two-dimensional multibeam antenna array (2D-MBAA) with analog-digital hybrid beamforming, which solves the problem of needing additional connection structure between the dual-polarized antenna array and analog feeding network for large-scale antenna arrays. The main design work is focused on the analog-beamformer (ABF) and two structures are proposed. One is vertical-crossed (VC) ABF and the other is parallel-crossed (PC) ABF, and the latter is a more complex design in exchange for a significantly reduced profile. As a verification, a $4\times 4$ dual-polarized 2D-MBAA with PC-ABF has been fabricated and tested. It is operated at 3.45GHz with a bandwidth of about 10%, and it can realize a scanning angle of ±45°.

Highlights

Among the 5th generation mobile communication (5G) application technologies, multibeam antenna technology plays an important role [1], [2]
The DBFs are realized in the digital domain with some digital radio frequency (RF) channels, and the feeding type of the digital RF channel is a coaxial connection, which can be achieved, and the design scheme of the digital-beam feeding network is the same whether it is single-polarized or dualpolarized, so this paper mainly introduces the design of the stacked analog beamformers (ABFs) of the dual-polarized 2D-multibeam antenna arrays (MBAAs) with hybrid beamforming
The directions of the thirty-two beams realized by the 4 × 4 dual-polarized 2D-MBAAs with VC- and parallel-crossed analog-beamformer (PC-ABF) are little different, only slightly different in gain, so only the thirty-two beams realized by the 4 × 4 dual-polarized 2D-MBAAs with PC-ABF at 3.45 GHz are shown here, as Fig. 13

Summary

Introduction

Among the 5th generation mobile communication (5G) application technologies, multibeam antenna technology plays an important role [1], [2]. By controlling the amplitude and phase distribution of the antenna array to achieve ultra-high gain and beam scanning, it can overcome the space transmission loss and improve the signal-to-noise ratio and channel capacity. In a full digital antenna array, each antenna is connected to a digital radio frequency (RF) channel, and each digital RF channel includes an amplitude-phase control module, data acquisition module, low noise amplifier (LNA), power amplifier (PA), etc., whose complexity is very high. The digital RF channels are used to feed the analog beamforming networks to achieve the hybrid feeding of the whole antenna array [3]. Since the existing digital RF channels are very mature, most of us focus on some problems of the analog beamforming networks

Objectives

Results

Conclusion