Figure of Merit for Objective Assessment of mmWave 5G Phased Arrays

Recently, considerable research efforts have been concentrated on the design of mmWave 5G phased array designs for base stations and small cells. However, it is difficult to compare the performance of different mmWave 5G phased array designs, as there are many design trade-offs, such as operational bandwidth, the number of elements, beam scanning range, realized antenna gain, polarization properties, and overall dimensions. Currently, there is no standard or figure of merit (FoM) for an objective assessment of the array performance. In this paper, we derive a FoM, which includes all the above factors to create a fair comparison of different mmWave 5G phased array designs. The proposed FoM is then applied to various mmWave 5G phased array designs from the literature to compare their performances.