A System-Performance-Based Comparison of Sparse Regular and Irregular Antenna Arrays for Millimeter-Wave Multi-User MIMO Base Stations
Journal article, 2022

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.

5G

Base stations

Zero-forcing

MmWave

Antenna arrays

MU-MIMO

Sparse arrays

Author

R. X.F. Bude

Eindhoven University of Technology

Thomas A.H. Bressner

Ericsson

Martin Johansson

Ericsson

Marianna Ivashina

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

A. B. Smolders

Eindhoven University of Technology

U. Johannsen

Eindhoven University of Technology

Electronics (Switzerland)

20799292 (eISSN)

Vol. 11 3 335

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

Communication Systems

Signal Processing

DOI

10.3390/electronics11030335

More information

Latest update

9/28/2023