Scaling Wideband Hybrid Beamforming for sub-THz Communication

TL;DR

This paper explores the capacity limits of wideband hybrid beamforming in sub-THz multiuser MIMO systems, proposing tiled architectures and strategies to mitigate beam squint, with comparisons to idealized benchmarks.

Contribution

It introduces a tiled hybrid beamforming architecture for sub-THz MIMO, analyzes hardware and power trade-offs, and compares beamforming strategies for wideband regimes.

Findings

Hybrid beamforming can approach digital array performance with proper tile design.

Beam squint significantly affects spectral efficiency in wideband regimes.

Sharing tiles among users offers a trade-off between complexity and performance.

Abstract

We investigate the capacity attainable for a multiuser MIMO uplink as we scale both array size and bandwidth for regimes in which all-digital arrays incur excessive hardware complexity and power consumption. We consider a tiled hybrid beamforming architecture in which each tile, or subarray, is a phased array performing analog (or RF) beamforming, followed by DSP on the tile outputs. For parameters compatible with sub-THz fixed access links, we discuss hardware and power consumption considerations for choosing tile size and the number of tiles. Noting that the problem of optimal multiuser MIMO in our wideband regime is open even for the simplest possible channel models, we compare the spectral efficiencies attainable by a number of reasonable strategies for tile-level RF beamforming, assuming flexibility in the digital signal processing (DSP) of the tile outputs. We consider a number of beam broadening approaches for addressing the ``beam squint'' incurred by RF beamforming in our wideband regime, along with strategies for sharing tiles among users. Information-theoretic benchmarks are computed for an idealized MIMO-OFDM system, with linear per-subcarrier multiuser detection compared against an unconstrained complexity receiver.