Nonuniform Array Design for Robust Millimeter-Wave MIMO Links

Spatial multiplexing for millimeter (mm) wave line of sight (LOS) links potentially enables data rates of the order of 10-100 Gbps. Most prior work in this area has focused on uniform transmit and receive arrays, for which it is known that the spatial responses seen by different transmitters can be made orthogonal by choosing the antenna spacing appropriately as a function of range and wavelength. In this paper, we show that variations in range can cause significant degradation in performance for such uniformly spaced arrays optimized for a given range, due to the appearance of high correlations between the spatial responses for different transmitters (and hence rank deficiency in the MIMO channel matrix) as a function of range. We then demonstrate that optimized nonuniform arrays alleviate this problem by keeping correlations between spatial responses small over a significantly larger set of ranges than is possible with uniform spacing.