Ray Antenna Array: A Novel Cost-Effective Multi-Antenna Architecture for Enhanced Wireless Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ray antenna array (RAA), a cost-effective multi-antenna architecture that enhances wireless communication by using simple, directional antenna elements arranged in rays, eliminating the need for expensive phase shifters.

Contribution

The paper presents the RAA architecture, a novel multi-antenna design that reduces hardware costs and improves performance by using ray-based antenna arrangements without analog or digital beamforming.

Findings

RAA significantly reduces hardware costs compared to HBF.

RAA achieves superior system performance in simulations.

RAA effectively enhances directional beamforming capabilities.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel multi-antenna architecture, termed ray antenna array (RAA), which aims to enhance wireless communication performance in a cost-effective manner. RAA is composed of massive cheap antenna elements and a few radio frequency (RF) chains. The massive antenna elements are arranged in a novel ray-like structure, with each ray corresponding to a simple uniform linear array (sULA) with a carefully designed orientation. The antenna elements of each sULA are directly connected to an RF combiner, so that the sULA in each ray is able to form a beam towards a direction matching the ray orientation without relying on any analog or digital beamforming. By further designing a ray selection network (RSN), appropriate sULAs are selected to connect to the RF chains for further baseband processing. Compared to conventional multi-antenna architectures like hybrid analog/digital beamforming (HBF), the proposed RAA has two major advantages. First, it can significantly reduce hardware costs since no phase shifters, which are usually expensive especially in high-frequency systems, are required. Besides, RAA can greatly improve system performance by configuring antenna elements with higher directionality, as each sULA only needs to be responsible for a portion of the total coverage angle. To demonstrate such advantages, in this paper, we first present the input-output model for RAA-based wireless communications, based on which the ray orientations of the RAA are designed. Furthermore, efficient algorithms for joint ray selection and beamforming are proposed for single-user and multi-user RAA-based wireless communications. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of RAA compared to HBF while significantly reducing hardware cost.