Joint Microstrip Selection and Beamforming Design for MmWave Systems with Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint microstrip selection and beamforming scheme for mmWave systems with dynamic metasurface antennas, effectively handling limited RF chains and approaching full-array performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint microstrip selection and beamforming method tailored for DMA-based mmWave systems with limited RF chains, including a low-complexity digital solution.

Findings

The proposed scheme achieves near-optimal performance compared to full-array systems.

Channel gain-based microstrip selection improves beamforming efficiency.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the joint design.

Abstract

Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) provide a new paradigm to realize large-scale antenna arrays for future wireless systems. In this paper, we study the downlink millimeter wave (mmWave) DMA systems with limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains. By using a specific DMA structure, an equivalent mmWave channel model is first explicitly characterized. Based on that, we propose an effective joint microstrip selection and beamforming scheme to accommodate for the limited number of RF chains. A low-complexity digital beamforming solution with channel gain-based microstrip selection is developed, while the analog beamformer is obtained via a coordinate ascent method. The proposed scheme is numerically shown to approach the performance of DMAs without RF chain reduction, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.