Millimeter Wave MIMO With Lens Antenna Array: A New Path Division Multiplexing Paradigm

By Yong Zeng, Rui Zhang. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2015

328 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a promising technology for future wireless systems, while one practical challenge is to achieve its large-antenna gains with only limited radio frequency (RF) chains for cost-effective implementation. To this end, we study in this paper a new lens antenna array enabled mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. We first show that the array response of lens antenna arrays follows a “sinc” function, where the antenna element with the peak response is determined by the angle of arrival (AoA)/departure (AoD) of the received/transmitted signal. By exploiting this unique property along with the multi-path sparsity of mmWave channels, we propose a novel low-cost and capacity-achieving spatial multiplexing scheme for both narrow-band and wide-band mmWave communications, termed path division multiplexing (PDM), where parallel data streams are transmitted over different propagation paths with simple per-path processing. We further propose a simple path grouping technique with group-based small-scale MIMO processing to effectively mitigate the inter-stream interference due to similar AoAs/AoDs. Numerical results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed mmWave lens MIMO against the conventional MIMO with uniform planar arrays (UPAs) and hybrid analog/digital processing. It is shown that the proposed design achieves significant throughput gains as well as complexity and cost reductions, thus leading to a promising new paradigm for mmWave MIMO communications.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/258f448f758cb3948f02ba5ba7f7f5a59c7b3f62

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In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Accessing From the Sky: A Tutorial on UAV Communications for 5G and Beyond (2019, background): “To overcome this issue, there have been signiﬁcant research efforts on developing cost-aware MIMO transceiver architectures, such as analog beamforming [64], hybrid anlog/digital precoding [65,66], and lens antenna array communications [67,68].”
A Comprehensive Survey on Millimeter Wave Communications for Fifth-Generation Wireless Networks: Feasibility and Challenges (2020, background): “has, in most current investigations, been neglected [289], which possibly results in SNR and system sum-rate, degradation [288].”
Communications and Signals Design for Wireless Power Transmission (2016, background): “devoted to enabling cost-effective massive MIMO and mmWave wireless communications via techniques such as analog beamforming [180], hybrid analog/digital processing [181], or the advanced lens antenna arrays [182], [183].”
Modeling and Performance Analysis for Movable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communications (2022, methodology): “Compared to conventional MIMO, massive MIMO is able to exploit the spatial correlation of large antenna arrays for attaining higher array gains and mitigating the multi-user interference more effectively [7], [8], [9], [10].”
A Simple Design of IRS-NOMA Transmission (2019, methodology): “A straightforward design for IRS-NOMA with finite resolution beamforming is inspired by lens antenna arrays in millimeter-wave networks [5].”
Channel Estimation for Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO With Hybrid Precoding Over Frequency-Selective Fading Channels (2016, methodology): “For mmWave m assive MIMO with the phase shifter network based hybrid precoding [1]–[3] or electromagnetic lens bas ed beamspace MIMO [4], [5], the number of radio frequency (RF) chains is usually much smaller than tha t of antennas for reduced hardware cost and power consumption.”
Movable-Antenna Enhanced Multiuser Communication via Antenna Position Optimization (2023, background): “Such ﬁxed and discrete deployment of antennas limits the diversity and spatial multiplexing performance of MIMO systems because the channel variation in the continuous spatial ﬁeld is not fully utilized.”
Iterative Channel Estimation Using LSE and Sparse Message Passing for MmWave MIMO Systems (2016, methodology): “These properties make the lens a practical and energy efficiency tool for implementing the RF frontend in beamforming systems [43], [44].”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, methodology): “By using the sub-array technique, a multi-beam mmWave-MIMO-NOMA scheme was proposed in [189].”
A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, background): “implementation of hybrid beamforming is lens antenna array [47,48], by exploiting the direction-dependent energy focusing capability of electromagnetic (EM) lenses.”
Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G (2019, background): “Among various deﬁnitions, [104] deﬁnes a lens array as a device whose main function is to “provide variable phase shifting for electromagnetic (EM) rays at different points on the lens aperture so as to achieve angle-dependent energy focusing property.””
Spectrum and Energy-Efficient Beamspace MIMO-NOMA for Millimeter-Wave Communications Using Lens Antenna Array (2017, methodology): “…maximum number of supported users at the same time-frequency resources is equal to the number of RF chains [9], i.e., K ≤ N RF , which is the fundamental limit of beamspace MIMO systems that was explicitly or implicitly considered in all published papers on beamspace MIMO [2], [4], [5], [9], [15].”
Millimeter Wave Communication: A Comprehensive Survey (2018, unknown): “Contrast to the studies in [54] and [55], which treat the EM lens and the antenna array separately by modeling the lens as an approximate spatial discrete Fourier transform (DFT) ﬁl-ter, a systematic designed framework regards the lens antenna array as an integrated component [56].”
An Overview of Sustainable Green 5G Networks (2016, methodology): “[5] Y.”