Performance Analysis and Codebook Design for mmWave Beamforming System With Beam Squint

Beamforming technology is widely used in millimeter wave systems to combat path losses, and beamformers are usually selected from a predefined codebook. Unfortunately, the traditional codebook design neglects the beam squint effect, and this will cause severe performance degradation when the bandwidth is large. In this letter, we consider that a codebook with fixed size is adopted in the wideband beamforming system. First, we analyze how beam squint affects system performance when all beams have the same width. The expression of average spectrum efficiency is derived based on the ideal beam pattern. Next, we formulate the optimization problem to design the optimal codebook. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed codebook deals with beam squint by spreading the beam coverage and significantly mitigates the performance degradation.

I. Introduction

Owing to the abundant spectrum resources, millimeter wave (mmWave) communication can support gigabit-per-second data rates and is regarded as one of the most promising technologies for future wireless communication systems [1]. However, due to the severe path losses in the mmWave band, the beamforming gains of large antenna arrays are required to improve signal power. To reduce the implementation complexity, beamformers are usually selected from a predefined codebook [2], [3].