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

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 ar...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on communications 2016-04, Vol.64 (4), p.1557-1571
Main Authors: Zeng, Yong, Zhang, Rui
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antenna arrays
Array signal processing
Arrays
Gain
Lens antenna array
Lens antennas
Lenses
Mathematical models
millimeter wave communications
Millimeter waves
MIMO
Multiplexing
path division multiplexing
Radio frequencies
Radio frequency
Receiving antennas
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0090-6778
1558-0857
DOI:10.1109/TCOMM.2016.2533490