Highly-efficient Hybrid Beamforming by Port Selection in Massive MIMO Multi-Mode Antenna Systems

Data rates of 100 Gbps and beyond are targeted for license-free multi-user radio communications in the frequency range below 10 GHz. A joint user and antenna-port scheduling algorithm is used to evaluate the performance of multi-mode antennas in a massive MIMO multipath environment. As a reference, dipole and cross-dipole antennas are considered. Simulation results indicate the mathematical relation between the achievable sum-rate on one hand and the number of ports per element of the base station (BS) antenna array and mobile station (MS) on the other hand. Spectral efficiency and the number of available data streams are increased at the same time. These findings promise new possibilities when designing massive MIMO systems targeting next generation networks.