Advanced Tri-Sectoral Multi-User Millimeter-Wave Smart Repeater

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tri-sectoral advanced smart repeater (ASR) that significantly improves coverage and capacity in mmWave wireless systems by extending angular coverage and optimizing multi-user precoding.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel tri-sectoral ASR design and a multi-user precoder optimization method to enhance coverage and spectral efficiency in mmWave systems.

Findings

ASR doubles the number of served UEs compared to conventional SR.

ASR improves cumulative spectral efficiency by an average factor of 2.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Smart Repeaters (SR) can potentially enhance the coverage in Millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communications. However, the angular coverage of the existing two-panel SR is too limited to make the SR a truly cost-effective mmWave range extender. This paper proposes the usage of a tri-sectoral Advanced SR (ASR) to extend the angular coverage with respect to conventional SR. We propose a multi-user precoder optimization for ASR in a downlink multi-carrier communication system to maximize the number of served User Equipments (UEs) while guaranteeing constraints on per-UE rate and time-frequency resources. Numerical results show the benefits of the ASR against conventional SR in terms of both cumulative spectral efficiency and number of served UEs (both improved by an average factor 2), varying the system parameters.