Multi-Channel Analog Beamforming Transceiver for mmWave Communications

This paper introduces an analog multi-channel millimeter-wave transceiver architecture that offers advantages in terms of low hardware complexity and computational efficiency compared to digital beamforming and hybrid beamforming techniques. Also, it is known that analog beamforming with a single phase-shifter network faces limitations in maintaining consistent accuracy across a wideband spectrum. To this end, the proposed architecture leverages the inherent bandwidth-splitting property of the multi-channel transceiver. Thus, each sub-band signal is processed by its corresponding channel in the transceiver with an independent analog beamformer per channel. This approach can significantly improve the beamforming accuracy in a wideband communication system such as 5G and future 6G cellular networks. The simulation results demonstrate that increasing the channels in the multi-channel transceiver enables multi-channel analog beamforming to achieve a comparable bit-error-rate (BER) performance to digital beamforming when interference is not considered. Moreover, when interference is present, the proposed multi-channel analog beamforming exhibits enhanced resilience to high power interference compared with digital beamforming with limited analog-to-digital conversion resolution.