Beam squint inspired multiple access technique in massive MIMO systems

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems implementing wideband signaling have been found to suffer from beam squinting problem. In multicarrier systems, beam squint causes spreading of the beam to multiple undesired directions, thereby degrading system capacity. This paper proposes user scheduling and precoding techniques that controls and exploit the beam squinting phenomenon to serve multiple users and improve the overall system capacity. The proposed techniques are based on the lens antenna subarray (LAS) mMIMO system. The proposed system design is explained and numerically evaluated in terms of beam gain and capacity with different number of users and RF chains. The simulation results exhibit significant performance enhancement in terms of beam gain and capacity, corroborating the idea of exploiting the beam squinting phenomenon to serve multiple spatially separated groups of users.