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Multiple Fan-Beam Antenna Array for Massive MIMO Applications

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Journal of Communications and Information Networks

Abstract

In this paper, a multiple fan-beam antenna array is proposed for massive multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) applications. The proposed array is based on vertical spatial filtering to reduce radio frequency complexity in a massive MIMO system. A microstrip line feeding network is utilized to achieve a specific phase distribution for multiple fan beams. A 64-element antenna array is designed and fabricated to validate the design strategy. The proposed antenna array uses 16 ports to excite 64 antenna elements, which is more cost effective than traditional massive MIMO systems. The measured results demonstrate that the proposed antenna array can achieve two fan beams at 7 in the vertical dimension, and the measured gain of every port exceeds 10 dBi at 2.6 GHz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Peiqin Liu, Yue Li & Zhijun Zhang

Authors
  1. Peiqin Liu
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  2. Yue Li
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  3. Zhijun Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhijun Zhang.

Additional information

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61525104).

Peiqin Liu received his B.S. degree from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2014. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University. His current research interests include antenna design and theory, particularly antenna arrays based on leaky-wave antennas, massive MIMO antenna arrays, and millimeter-wave antenna arrays. (Email: lpq14@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn)

Yue Li received his B.S. degree in Telecommunication Engineering from Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China, in 2007, and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University. In June 2012, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University. In December 2013, he was a research scholar in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. He was also a visiting scholar in Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore, in 2010, and Hawaii Center of Advanced Communication (HCAC), University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, the USA, in 2012. Since January 2016, he has been with Tsinghua University, where he is an Assistant Professor. He has authored and coauthored over 80 journal papers and 30 international conference papers, and holds 15 granted Chinese patents. His current research interests include metamaterials, plasmonics, electromagnetics, nanocircuits, mobile and handset antennas, MIMO and diversity antennas, and millimeter-wave antennas and arrays. He was the recipient of the Issac Koga Gold Medal from URSI General Assembly in 2017, the Young Scientist Awards from URSI AP-RASC 2016, the Young Scientist Awards from EMTS 2016, the Best Student Paper Award form ICMMT 2016, the Best Paper Award form ISAPE 2016, the Young Scientist Awards from URSI General Assembly in 2014, the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of Beijing Municipality in 2013, and the Principal Scholarship of Tsinghua University in 2011. (Email: lyee@tsinghua.edu.cn)

Zhijun Zhang [corresponding author] received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1999. In 1999, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Utah, where he was appointed a Research Assistant Professor in 2001. In May 2002, he was an Assistant Researcher with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, the USA. In November 2002, he joined Amphenol T&M Antennas, Vernon Hills, IL, as a Senior Staff Antenna Development Engineer and was then promoted to the position of Antenna Engineer Manager. In 2004, he joined Nokia Inc., San Diego, CA, as a Senior Antenna Design Engineer. In 2006, he joined Apple Inc., Cupertino, CA, as a Senior Antenna Design Engineer and was then promoted to the position of Principal Antenna Engineer. Since August 2007, he has been with Tsinghua University, where he is a Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering. He is the author of Antenna Design for Mobile Devices (Wiley, 1st ed. 2011, 2nd ed. 2017). He served as Associate Editor of the IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation(2010-2014) and the IEEE antennas and wireless propagation letters(2009-2015). (Email: zjzh@tsinghua.edu.cn)

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Liu, P., Li, Y. & Zhang, Z. Multiple Fan-Beam Antenna Array for Massive MIMO Applications. J. Commun. Inf. Netw. 3, 38–42 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0003-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41650-018-0003-8

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