Large Antenna Array with Hybrid Beamforming System for 5G Indoor Communication Network Deployments

The millimeter-wave multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology is the frontier for 5G communication systems. This work contributes a large antenna array with a limited number of radio frequency chains using the hybrid beamforming (HBF) technique that overcomes extreme path loss in the mmWave system to improve spectral efficiency. The link budget analysis is given for the target data rate of 11.3 Gbps for the point-to-point communication. The number of antenna elements required for the proposed antenna array is determined via link budget analysis. The proposed system includes single element patch antenna configuration, array factor analysis, and beam steering capability. The transmit and receive antenna gain specifications minimize the path loss and improve the system throughput. Combiners and hybrid precoders are designed together in an iterative way for reducing the cost function of the weighted minimum mean squared(WMMSE) error. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HBF algorithm performance is highly effective and performs closer to the fully digital beamforming technique. The proposed large antenna array with HBF uses the New York University Simulator (NYUSIM) to perform omnidirectional and directional power delay profile analysis with the most potent power. The proposed large antenna array with HBF methodology provides an optimal approach to indoor point-to-point communication deployments.

Flexibly Extensible Planar Self-Isolated Wideband MIMO Antenna for 5G Communications

A planar flexibly extensible multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) antenna array with a self-isolation property is proposed. The main characteristics of the proposed array are: (i) no extra isolation structure is required to improve isolation between elements; (ii) elements are arranged with each other with a spacing of 0 mm, (iii) the configuration can be flexibly extended to a large antenna array according to actual requirements. For a test example, the practical processing and testing of an eight-element array is conducted. The tested results demonstrate that the proposed design possesses wide impedance bandwidth (IBW) of 65% and very good isolation (＞18 dB) across the operating bandwidth, which match well with the simulated ones. Moreover, envelope correlation coefficient (ECC) is calculated to valuate MIMO performance; an acceptable ECC (lower than 0.05) suggests that the proposed configuration has good diversity performance and can be a potential candidate for MIMO communications.