A System-Performance-Based Comparison of Sparse Regular and Irregular Antenna Arrays for Millimeter-Wave Multi-User MIMO Base Stations

• A system-level study was conducted that evaluated the system performance of various dense and sparse antenna array configurations for application in millimeter-wave multi-user multiple-input multiple-output base stations. The performance was evaluated by investigating the probability that a user experiences an outage when a zero-forcing pre-coder is used in a random line of sight scenario. This paper shows that the outage probability significantly decreased when irregular sparse arrays were used rather than regular sparse or regular dense arrays. A re-configurable linear array was designed and realized as a demonstrator. It used 3D-printed aluminum box horn antenna elements that had wide scanning range in the azimuthal plane and a small scanning range in the elevation plane. For the demonstrator, it was shown that the outage probability was reduced from 3.85% to 0.64% by moving from a sparse regularly spaced array to a sparse randomly spaced array. This amounted to an improvement of a factor of six. The sparse topology allowed for the usage of large antenna elements that had an increased gain and still achieved wide-angle scanning, while reducing mutual coupling to a minimum.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Telekommunikation (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Telecommunications (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

Keyword

5G

Base stations

Zero-forcing

MmWave

Antenna arrays

MU-MIMO

Sparse arrays

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)