Analysis of Antenna and RF Front-End Topologies for Multi-Beam Systems

Abstract

Traditionally, antenna design involves optimizing the design parameters such as gain, minimum sidelobe level, scan range, half power beamwidth, for a particular application. Since 5G systems are pushing the boundaries for cellular communications by introducing unique challenges such as multiple beam antennas, beamforming etc. in the field of antenna design. Although separate studies do exist on these challenges, the concept antenna
synthesis using different disciplines is relatively new. This work presents a 5G simulation model using a recently proposed hybrid beamforming technique employing cosecant power flux equalization in elevation plane with digital beamforming in azimuth plane. Various beamforming algorithms in azimuth domain are investigated for concurrent users sharing same frequency spectrum and their impact on system performance such as signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) is statistically analyzed. Moreover, the impact of antenna sidelobe levels on system SINR performance is investigated in detail. The simulation results shows that the cosecant subarray hybrid beamforming performs better than traditional hybrid beamforming in terms of SINR for cell edge users. In addition to that, this work provides a unique perspective to system
engineers for intuitively analyzing the impact of antenna system on communication link and to derive design requirements that would be crucial in the antenna system synthesis