Uniform Linear Arrays With Optimized Inter-Element Spacing for LOS Massive MIMO

In this letter, a uniform linear array (ULA) is proposed for line-of-sight massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO). It is assumed that the number of antennas is fixed. For a given ULA with an arbitrary inter-element spacing, the probability that the correlation among the channel vectors of two users being above a threshold value is derived. The inter-element spacing of the proposed ULA is the one for which the aforementioned probability is minimized. To show the effectiveness of the proposed ULA, simulation results for two scenarios are given for a 64-antenna ULA that serves 6 single-antenna users. By using the proposed ULA instead of conventional half-wavelength ULA, 5th percentile sum-rate for zero-forcing precoder is improved by 9.90 bits/channel use in first scenario without dropping, and by 1.43 bits/channel use in second scenario with dropping 1 user.