Reconfigurable Antennas in mmWave MIMO Systems

The key obstacle to achieving the full potential of the millimeter wave (mmWave) band has been the poor propagation characteristics of wireless signals in this band. One approach to overcome this issue is to use antennas that can support higher gains while providing beam adaptability and diversity, i.e., reconfigurable antennas. In this article, we present a new architecture for mmWave multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) communications that uses a new class of reconfigurable antennas. More specifically, the proposed lens-based antennas can support multiple radiation patterns while using a single radio frequency chain. Moreover, by using a beam selection network, each antenna beam can be steered in the desired direction. Further, using the proposed reconfigurable antenna in a MIMO architecture, we propose a new signal processing algorithm that uses the additional degrees of freedom provided by the antennas to overcome propagation issues at mmWave frequencies. Our simulation results show that the proposed reconfigurable antenna MIMO architecture significantly enhances the performance of mmWave communication systems. M. A. Almasi and H. Mehrpouyan are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725 USA (e-mails: [email protected], [email protected]). V. Vakilian is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, California State University, Bakersfield, CA 93311 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). N. Behdad is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin−Madison, Madison, WI 30332 USA (email: [email protected]). H. Jafarkhani is with the Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). This project is supported in part by the NSF ERAS grant award numbers 1642865, 1642536, 1642601, 1642567. ar X iv :1 71 0. 05 11 1v 2 [ ee ss .S P] 2 4 O ct 2 01 7