Digital Predistortion in Large-Array Digital Beamforming Transmitters

In this article, we propose a novel digital predistortion (DPD) solution that allows to considerably reduce the complexity resulting from linearizing a set of power amplifiers (PAs) in single-user large-scale digital beamforming transmitters. In contrast to current state-of-the art solutions that assume a dedicated DPD per power amplifier, which is unfeasible in the context of large antenna arrays, the proposed solution only requires a single DPD in order to linearize an arbitrary number of power amplifiers. To this end, the proposed DPD predistorts the signal at the input of the digital precoder based on minimizing the nonlinear distortion of the combined signal at the intended receiver direction. This is a desirable feature, since the resulting emissions in other directions get partially diluted due to less coherent superposition. With this approach, only a single DPD is required, yielding great complexity and energy savings.