Diversity gain of millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems with distributed antenna arrays

• Published in: EURASIP journal on wireless communications and networking Vol. 2019; no. 1; pp. 1 - 13
• Main Authors: Yue, Dian-Wu, Xu, Shuai, Nguyen, Ha H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 04.03.2019; Springer Nature B.V; SpringerOpen
• Subjects: Antenna arrays; Antennas; Architecture; Communications Engineering; Data transmission; Distributed antenna subarrays; Diversity gain; Diversity-multiplexing trade-off; Engineering; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Massive MIMO; Millimeter waves; Millimeter-wave communications; MIMO (control systems); Multiplexing gain; Networks; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Theorems; Millimeter-wave communications; Diversity gain; Diversity-multiplexing trade-off; Multiplexing gain; Massive MIMO; Distributed antenna subarrays; Hybrid precoding
• ISSN: 1687-1499; 1687-1472; 1687-1499
• DOI: 10.1186/s13638-019-1366-8

This paper is concerned with diversity gain analysis for millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems employing distributed antenna subarray architecture. First, for a single-user mmWave system in which the transmitter and receiver consist of K t and K r subarrays, respectively, a diversity gain theorem is established when the numbers of subarray antennas go to infinity. Specifically, assuming that all subchannels have the same number of propagation paths L , the theorem states that by employing such a distributed antenna subarray architecture, a diversity gain of K r K t L − N s +1 can be achieved, where N s represents the number of data streams. This result means that compared to the co-located antenna architecture, using the distributed antenna subarray architecture can scale up the diversity gain proportionally to K r K t . The analysis of diversity gain is then extended to the multiuser scenario as well as the scenario with conventional partially connected radio-frequency structure in the literature. Simulation results obtained with the hybrid analog/digital processing corroborate the analysis results and show that the distributed subarray architecture indeed yields a significantly better diversity performance than the co-located antenna architectures.