Beam Squint Exploitation for Linear Phased Arrays in a mmWave Multi-Carrier System

To support millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications successfully, a large number of antennas (in the order of hundreds or thousands) must be implemented to mitigate significant propagation and scattering losses. Designing phased arrays for carrier frequency is a great method for narrowband systems, but the performance degrades significantly with larger bandwidth. We show that as the system bandwidth increases, the beams steer away from the focus direction, which is an effect known as beam squint in wideband systems. In this paper, at first, analysis of capacity is performed for an increasing number of antennas, to show the significance of beam squint. Then, a solution in digital domain is proposed. Conventionally, a single beam would be allocated to a user. By exploiting beam squint effect, in this solution more than one beam can carry a single-user’s data, which improves the system’s performance significantly, especially when the number of antennas in an array is large and there are multiple users.