2D Antenna Array Structures for Hybrid Massive MIMO Precoding

This paper investigates the performance behaviours of various antenna array structures for hybrid massive-MIMO precoding schemes. In particular, the proposed hybrid scheme includes two cascaded stages: the RF-beamforming stage is designed via the eigen-decomposition of the massive-MIMO channel second-order correlation matrix while the baseband multi-user (MU) precoding stage is constructed via the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) technique to mitigating the MU-interference in the reduced-dimension effective MU-channel. A transfer block is introduced between the RF-beamforming and baseband precoding stages to significantly reduce the number of required RF chains. For the same number of antenna elements with half-wavelength spacing, we examine the achieved sum-rate performance of different 2D antenna array structures, namely, uniform linear array (ULA), uniform rectangular array (URA), uniform circular array (UCA), and concentric circular array (CCA), in serving multiple users in various angle-of-departure (AoD) settings. Simulation results indicate that, among the array structures, URA and CCA can offer both smaller array sizes and higher achieved sum-rate. Furthermore, for various user angular locations, the sum-rate of URA can vary about 2 bits/s/Hz while CCA can give an invariant sum-rate performance.