Cross-polarization RF precoding to mitigate mobile misorientation and polarization leakage

Dual-polarized antennas provide a mechanism to achieve polarization diversity or multiplex non-interfering data streams over-the-air. Practical realization of dual-polarized transmission, however, must overcome challenges such as mobile misorientation with respect to the base station as well as non-ideal polarization isolation. With the advent of mmWave communications, dual-polarized large scale antenna arrays can be realized inexpensively. In this paper, we propose a beamforming algorithm that jointly designs the horizontal and vertical beamformers and combiners to maximize spectral efficiency in the presence of mobile misorientation and polarization leakage. First, we show that dual-polarized antenna arrays introduce channel structure that enables mobile orientation estimation without explicit channel knowledge. We derive the maximum likelihood estimate of the azimuth and elevation mobile rotation. Given these estimates, we design the horizontal and vertical beamformer and combiner with practical RF hardware constraints. We generalize the beamforming algorithm to enable multiplexing multiple data streams across different channel paths in the horizontal and vertical domain. Results show that mobile orientation estimation using dual-polarized antenna arrays achieves over 90% accuracy even below 0 dB. Using a realistic clustered channel model, spectral efficiency gains of the order of 5 dB are demonstrated over dual-polarized antennas with independent horizontal/vertical beam steering as well as single polarized antenna arrays.