Analog Precoding Using Highly Reconfigurable Antennas

The feasibility of using highly reconfigurable antennas (HRA) in analog precoding is investigated. The advantage of the HRA approach is that it relaxes the constraints on the RF implementation of the analog precoding compared to the conventional approach based on phase shifters, RF combining and uniform linear arrays. Our contributions include a method for determining the required configurations for the HRA and mapping the CSI to the appropriate HRA configuration. In addition, comparison of the resulting performance to the conventional analog precoding approach is performed. These comparisons show that the HRA precoding approach has nearly identical performance for supporting a single user, compared to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that HRA precoding can be a viable analog precoding approach.