Multi-Beam Multi-Stream Communications for 5G and beyond Mobile User Equipment and UAV Proof of Concept Designs

Millimeter-wave (mmWave), massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), are expected to play a crucial role for 5G and beyond cellular and next-generation wireless local area network (WLAN) communications. Moreover, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are also considered as an important component of next-generation networks. In this paper, we propose and present a mmWave distributed phased-arrays (DPA) architecture and proof-of-concept (PoC) designs for user equipment (UE) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which will be used in 5G/Beyond 5G wireless communication networks. Through enabling a multi-stream multi-beam communication mode, the UE PoC achieves a peak downlink speed of more than 4 Gbps with optimized thermal distribution performance. Furthermore, based on the DPA topology, the UAV aerial base station (ABS) prototype is designed and demonstrates for the first time an aggregated peak downlink data rate of 2.2 Gbps in the real-world field tests supporting multi-user (MU) application scenarios.