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mmWave communications for 5G: implementation challenges and advances

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Abstract

The requirement of the fifth generation (5G) wireless communication for high throughput motivates the wireless industry to use the mmWave (millimeter wave) communications for its wide bandwidth advantage. To compensate the heavy path loss and increase the communications capacity, phased array beamforming and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques are employed at both the user equipment (UE) and base stations (BS). Considering the commercial requirements, 5G mmWave large array systems should be implemented in an energy- and cost-efficient way with a small form factor. To address above issues and realize a reliable communications link, taking into account the particular characteristics of 5G mmWave systems, this paper firstly examines the design challenges and trade-offs in system implementations, then some of the design strategies are summarized. At last, recent advance in RF front-end circuits and receiver sub-systems is then highlighted.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National High-Tech Project (863) of China (Grant Nos. 2011AA010201, 2011AA010202), National Nature Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61306030, 61674037), National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFC0800400), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Lianming Li, Dongming Wang, Xiaokang Niu, Yuan Chai, Linhui Chen, Long He, Xu Wu, Fuchun Zheng, Tiejun Cui & Xiaohu You

  2. National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Lianming Li, Dongming Wang, Xiaokang Niu, Xu Wu & Xiaohu You

  3. State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Yuan Chai, Linhui Chen, Fuchun Zheng & Tiejun Cui

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  1. Lianming Li
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  2. Dongming Wang
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Correspondence to Lianming Li.

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Li, L., Wang, D., Niu, X. et al. mmWave communications for 5G: implementation challenges and advances. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 61, 021301 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9262-8

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