Range distribution aware architecture dimensioning for mm-wave systems

Abstract

Mm-wave spectrum (30 to 300 GHz) is explored in order to provide higher throughput by exploiting the large bandwidth available. Due to those higher frequencies, future systems are expected to have larger antenna arrays with more directive beams relying on line-of-sight propagation. Besides wider bandwidth, high-throughput systems also aim at serving multiple users in parallel. When those users are located at different ranges from the base station, they put very different requirements on the base station architecture and signals. This can translate, e.g., into architectures having different numbers of components and power consumption to optimally serve those users. Finding the architecture offering the best throughput vs. power consumption trade-off while serving multiple users at different distances is still an open problem in the literature. Typically, power optimization has been done considering a fixed operating distance and neglecting the user distribution which is crucial in future communication systems. To that end, we propose a novel range distribution aware (RDA) architecture dimensioning methodology that optimizes the power consumption of a transceiver architecture over the operating range by exploiting the user distribution. We show that the RDA design methodology can reduce the average power consumption of the transceiver by 20% in a typical scenario compared to traditional power optimization.