Aperture Selection for CAP Arrays (CAPAs)

TL;DR

This paper introduces aperture selection for continuous aperture arrays (CAPAs), analyzing its impact on uplink communication performance in LoS and NLoS scenarios, highlighting its benefits in diversity and complexity reduction.

Contribution

It proposes the concept of aperture selection for CAPAs and analyzes its performance benefits in different propagation scenarios, including optimal strategies and outage probability.

Findings

Aperture selection follows the nearest neighbor criterion in LoS.

Selection diversity improves performance while reducing complexity.

Outage probability and diversity order are characterized in NLoS.

Abstract

The concept of aperture selection is proposed for continuous aperture array (CAPA)-based communications. The achieved performance is analyzed in an uplink scenario by considering both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios. In the LoS scenario, the optimal selection strategy is demonstrated to follow the nearest neighbor criterion, and the resulting signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is analyzed. In the NLoS scenario, the achieved outage probability along with the diversity order is revealed. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that aperture selection effectively maintains satisfactory performance by leveraging selection diversity while simultaneously reducing the implementation complexity of CAPAs.