Beamforming with Multiple One-Bit Wireless Transceivers

TL;DR

This paper explores beamforming techniques using one-bit wireless transceivers, framing it as a constellation design problem and demonstrating near-capacity performance compared to linear transceivers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective on beamforming with one-bit devices as a codebook design problem, providing insights into performance limits.

Findings

Near-capacity SNR performance with one-bit transceivers

Beamforming as a constellation design problem

Performance within a few dB of linear transceivers

Abstract

Classical beamforming techniques rely on highly linear transmitters and receivers to allow phase-coherent combining at the transmitter and receiver. The transmitter uses beamforming to steer signal power towards the receiver, and the receiver uses beamforming to gather and coherently combine the signals from multiple receiver antennas. When the transmitters and receivers are instead constrained for power and cost reasons to be non-linear one-bit devices, the potential advantages and performance metrics associated with beamforming are not as well understood. We define beamforming at the transmitter as a codebook design problem to maximize the minimum distance between codewords. We define beamforming at the receiver as the maximum likelihood detector of the transmitted codeword. We show that beamforming with one-bit transceivers is a constellation design problem, and that we can come within a few dB SNR of the capacity attained by linear transceivers.