A novel transceiver design in wideband massive mimo for beam squint minimization

Abstract

When using ultra-wideband signaling on massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems, the electromagnetic wave incurs an extra delay (across the array elements) comparable to or larger than the symbol duration, which translates into a shift in beam direction known as the beam squint effect. The beam squinting problem degrades the array gain and reduces the system capacity. This paper proposes a novel transceiver design based on lens antenna subarray and analog subband filters to compensate for the beam squinting effect. Specifically, the proposed design chunks the wideband signal from the phase shifters into groups of narrowband signals and controls their squints through an exhaustive search-based switching/precoding mechanism under the lenses. Furthermore, a simplified, thresholded search-based precoding algorithm is proposed, which demonstrates good performance while significantly minimizing complexity. The proposed system is analyzed in terms of beam gain, complexity, power consumption, and capacity. The numerical results demonstrate significant performance enhancement for the proposed system design as compared to the conventional mMIMO system with an uncompensated beam squinting problem.