Sparse Array Topologies for 5G mmWave Base-Stations: A System-Level Study

A system-level study is conducted that evaluates the performance of various sparse array topologies for application in 5G base-stations. The performance metric is the probability a user experiences an outage, when applying a Zero-Forcing precoder in a Line-of-Sight scenario. The outage probability is shown to significantly decrease for sparse irregular arrays as compared to sparse regular and dense regular arrays. A re-configurable sparse array design at 28.5GHz is realized as a demonstrator.