A Unified Approach for Beam-Split Mitigation in Terahertz Wideband Hybrid Beamforming

TL;DR

This paper proposes a unified hybrid beamforming method for terahertz wideband systems that effectively mitigates beam-split effects without additional hardware, enhancing spectral efficiency in multi-user scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a beam-split-aware hybrid beamforming approach that computes beam-split effects and integrates them into digital beamformers, avoiding the need for virtual subcarrier-dependent analog beamformers.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over conventional methods.

Effective beam-split mitigation in multi-user terahertz systems.

Applicable to various hybrid beamforming architectures.

Abstract

The sixth generation networks envision the deployment of terahertz (THz) band as one of the key enabling property thanks to its abundant bandwidth. However, the ultra-wide bandwidth in THz causes beam-split phenomenon due to the use of a single analog beamformer (AB). Specifically, beam-split makes different subcarriers to observe distinct directions since the same AB is adopted for all subcarriers. Previous works mostly employ additional hardware components, e.g., time-delayer networks to mitigate beam-split by realizing virtual subcarrier-dependent ABs. This paper introduces an efficient and unified approach, called beam-split-aware (BSA) hybrid beamforming. In particular, instead of virtually generating subcarrier-dependent ABs, a single AB is used and the effect of beam-split is computed and passed into the digital beamformers, which are subcarrier-dependent while maximizing spectral efficiency. Hence, the proposed BSA approach effectively mitigates the impact of beam-split and it can be applied to any hybrid beamforming architecture. Manifold optimization and orthogonal matching pursuit techniques are considered for the evaluation of the proposed approach in multi-user scenario. Numerical simulations show that significant performance improvement can be achieved as compared to the conventional techniques.