Structured Non-Uniformly Spaced Rectangular Antenna Array Design for FD-MIMO Systems

Full-dimensional multiple-input multiple-output (FD-MIMO) systems, whereby each base station is equipped with a uniformly spaced rectangular antenna array (URA), provides a practical means of realizing massive MIMO systems. However, the spectral efficiency of URA is considerably lower than that of its uniformly spaced linear array counterpart having the same number of antenna elements. In this paper, we first introduce a discrete angular resolution metric for quantifying the low resolution of URA in the antenna-elevation domain. This motivates us to propose a novel antenna device design, referred to as the structured non-uniformly spaced rectangular array (NURA), in which the antenna elements are non-uniformly distributed in the elevation-angle domain. Specifically, we conceive a structured NURA device for which the nonuniform distribution of the elevation-domain antenna elements is controlled by a single parameter. The design of the optimally structured NURA for the given nonlinear antenna-element-positioning function then becomes a single-parameter optimization, namely, that of maximizing the spectral efficiency of the FD-MIMO system, which can be solved efficiently. Our simulation results demonstrate that our structured NURA design significantly outperforms the standard URA in terms of achievable spectral efficiency. Our proposed structured NURA design therefore offers an effective practical framework for enhancing the achievable performance of FD-MIMO systems.