Ray Antenna Array: A Novel Cost-Effective Multi-Antenna Architecture for Enhanced Wireless Communication
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| Acceso en línea: | |
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| _version_ | 1866915303130136576 |
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| author | Dong, Zhenjun Zhou, Zhiwen Zeng, Yong |
| author_facet | Dong, Zhenjun Zhou, Zhiwen Zeng, Yong |
| contents | This paper proposes a novel multi-antenna architecture, termed ray antenna array (RAA), which aims to enhance wireless communication performance in a cost-effective manner. RAA is composed of massive cheap antenna elements and a few radio frequency (RF) chains. The massive antenna elements are arranged in a novel ray-like structure, with each ray corresponding to a simple uniform linear array (sULA) with a carefully designed orientation. The antenna elements of each sULA are directly connected to an RF combiner, so that the sULA in each ray is able to form a beam towards a direction matching the ray orientation without relying on any analog or digital beamforming. By further designing a ray selection network (RSN), appropriate sULAs are selected to connect to the RF chains for further baseband processing. Compared to conventional multi-antenna architectures like hybrid analog/digital beamforming (HBF), the proposed RAA has two major advantages. First, it can significantly reduce hardware costs since no phase shifters, which are usually expensive especially in high-frequency systems, are required. Besides, RAA can greatly improve system performance by configuring antenna elements with higher directionality, as each sULA only needs to be responsible for a portion of the total coverage angle. To demonstrate such advantages, in this paper, we first present the input-output model for RAA-based wireless communications, based on which the ray orientations of the RAA are designed. Furthermore, efficient algorithms for joint ray selection and beamforming are proposed for single-user and multi-user RAA-based wireless communications. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of RAA compared to HBF while significantly reducing hardware cost. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_18163 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Ray Antenna Array: A Novel Cost-Effective Multi-Antenna Architecture for Enhanced Wireless Communication Dong, Zhenjun Zhou, Zhiwen Zeng, Yong Signal Processing Hardware Architecture Information Theory This paper proposes a novel multi-antenna architecture, termed ray antenna array (RAA), which aims to enhance wireless communication performance in a cost-effective manner. RAA is composed of massive cheap antenna elements and a few radio frequency (RF) chains. The massive antenna elements are arranged in a novel ray-like structure, with each ray corresponding to a simple uniform linear array (sULA) with a carefully designed orientation. The antenna elements of each sULA are directly connected to an RF combiner, so that the sULA in each ray is able to form a beam towards a direction matching the ray orientation without relying on any analog or digital beamforming. By further designing a ray selection network (RSN), appropriate sULAs are selected to connect to the RF chains for further baseband processing. Compared to conventional multi-antenna architectures like hybrid analog/digital beamforming (HBF), the proposed RAA has two major advantages. First, it can significantly reduce hardware costs since no phase shifters, which are usually expensive especially in high-frequency systems, are required. Besides, RAA can greatly improve system performance by configuring antenna elements with higher directionality, as each sULA only needs to be responsible for a portion of the total coverage angle. To demonstrate such advantages, in this paper, we first present the input-output model for RAA-based wireless communications, based on which the ray orientations of the RAA are designed. Furthermore, efficient algorithms for joint ray selection and beamforming are proposed for single-user and multi-user RAA-based wireless communications. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of RAA compared to HBF while significantly reducing hardware cost. |
| title | Ray Antenna Array: A Novel Cost-Effective Multi-Antenna Architecture for Enhanced Wireless Communication |
| topic | Signal Processing Hardware Architecture Information Theory |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18163 |