Wireless access using MIMO subarrays at mm-wave bands

This paper shows a way to get high capacity outdoor radio link for a line-of-sight (LOS) system in the 70 GHz portion of the E-band (71-76 GHz). We consider a short range application with a maximum distance equal to 200 m. We design and evaluate the performance of a MIMO system with equal element spacing at the transmitter and the receiver. Each node of the MIMO system consists of a uniform rectangular array (URA), where the single element is a patch antenna, in order to achieve higher gains and narrow beams. Such configuration is much more compact compared to the antennas currently applied for the same bandwidth. We optimize the inter-element distances at the transmitter and the receiver. We evaluate the capacity achievable with different array sizes. The results show that, for the proposed link budget, capacity up to 34 bit/s/Hz is achievable at a range of 200 m, with practical dimensions.