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

Electronics

Marianna V. Ivashina¹  Adrianus Bernardus Smolders²  Roel X. F. Budé²  Ulf Johannsen²  Thomas A. H. Bressner³  Martin N. Johansson⁴ 

[1] Electrical Engineering Department, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96 Gothenburg, Sweden;Electrical Engineering Department, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5612 AZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands;Ericsson R&D Electronics, Ericsson Antenna Technology Germany GmbH, 83026 Rosenheim, Germany;Ericsson Research, Ericsson AB, 417 56 Gothenburg, Sweden;

关键词: 5G;    mmWave;    antenna arrays;    zero-forcing;    sparse arrays;    MU-MIMO;   

DOI  :  10.3390/electronics11030335

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

Unknown