Wideband Beamforming for Hybrid Massive MIMO Terahertz Communications

The combination of large bandwidth at terahertz (THz) and the large number of antennas in massive MIMO results in the non-negligible spatial wideband effect in time domain or the corresponding beam squint issue in frequency domain, which will cause severe performance degradation if not properly treated. In particular, for a phased array based hybrid transceiver, there exists a contradiction between the requirement of mitigating the beam squint issue and the hardware implementation of the analog beamformer/combiner, which makes the accurate beamforming an enormous challenge. In this paper, we propose two wideband hybrid beamforming approaches, based on the virtual sub-array and the true-time-delay (TTD) lines, respectively, to eliminate the impact of beam squint. The former one divides the whole array into several virtual sub-arrays to generate a wider beam and provides an evenly distributed array gain across the whole operating frequency band. To further enhance the beamforming performance and thoroughly address the aforementioned contradiction, the latter one introduces the TTD lines and propose a new hardware implementation of analog beamformer/combiner. This TTD-aided hybrid implementation enables the wideband beamforming and achieves the near-optimal performance close to full-digital transceivers. Analytical and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of two proposed wideband beamforming approaches.

Automated summary

In this paper, two wideband hybrid beamforming approaches are proposed to address the beam squint issue in massive MIMO systems, based on virtual sub-array and TTD lines respectively. These methods enhance beamforming performance and resolve hardware implementation contradiction.