Energy-efficient Dynamic-subarray with Fixed True-time-delay Design for Terahertz Wideband Hybrid Beamforming

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel energy-efficient hybrid beamforming architecture with fixed true-time-delay for Terahertz systems, effectively mitigating beam squint and enhancing performance in ultra-wideband, large-scale antenna arrays.

Contribution

It proposes a low-cost, energy-efficient DS-FTTD architecture with a new RD algorithm for hybrid beamforming in THz UM-MIMO systems, addressing beam squint issues.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal array gain with the RD algorithm.

Significantly improves energy efficiency over existing architectures.

Robust spectral efficiency under imperfect channel information.

Abstract

Hybrid beamforming for Terahertz (THz) ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (UM-MIMO) systems is a promising technology for 6G space-air-ground integrated networks, which can overcome huge propagation loss and offer unprecedented data rates. With ultra-wide bandwidth and ultra-large-scale antennas array in THz band, the beam squint becomes one of the critical problems which could reduce the array gain and degrade the data rate substantially. However, the traditional phase-shifters-based hybrid beamforming architectures cannot tackle this issue due to the frequency-flat property of the phase shifters. In this paper, to combat the beam squint while keeping high energy efficiency, a novel dynamic-subarray with fixed true-time-delay (DS-FTTD) architecture is proposed. Compared to the existing studies which use the complicated adjustable TTDs, the DS-FTTD architecture has lower power consumption and hardware complexity, thanks to the low-cost FTTDs. Furthermore, a low-complexity row-decomposition (RD) algorithm is proposed to design hybrid beamforming matrices for the DS-FTTD architecture. Extensive simulation results show that, by using the RD algorithm, the DS-FTTD architecture achieves near-optimal array gain and significantly higher energy efficiency than the existing architectures. Moreover, the spectral efficiency of DS-FTTD architecture with the RD algorithm is robust to the imperfect channel state information.