A New Reconfigurable Antenna MIMO Architecture for mmWave Communication

TL;DR

This paper proposes a reconfigurable antenna MIMO architecture for mmWave communication that enhances capacity and robustness by using lens-based antennas and space-time coding, achieving full diversity without channel state information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel reconfigurable antenna MIMO system with lens-based antennas supporting multiple patterns, improving mmWave MIMO performance without needing channel state information.

Findings

Achieves full-diversity gain with linear receivers.

Outperforms traditional MIMO schemes in mmWave channels.

Supports multiple radiation patterns with a single RF chain.

Abstract

The large spectrum available in the millimeter-Wave (mmWave) band has emerged as a promising solution for meeting the huge capacity requirements of the 5th generation (5G) wireless networks. However, to fully harness the potential of mmWave communications, obstacles such as severe path loss, channel sparsity and hardware complexity should be overcome. In this paper, we introduce a generalized reconfigurable antenna multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture that takes advantage of lens-based reconfigurable antennas. The considered antennas can support multiple radiation patterns simultaneously by using a single RF chain. The degrees of freedom provided by the reconfigurable antennas are used to, first, combat channel sparsity in MIMO mmWave systems. Further, to suppress high path loss and shadowing at mmWave frequencies, we use a rate-one space-time block code. Our analysis and simulations show that the proposed reconfigurable MIMO architecture achieves full-diversity gain by using linear receivers and without requiring channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, simulations show that the proposed architecture outperforms traditional MIMO transmission schemes in mmWave channel settings.