6G Coverage Enhancement Solution Using Pattern Reconfigurable Antenna-Array at UE

Supporting the same cell-coverage with upper-6GHz and FR3 bands as in FR1 bands is a main challenge for 6G networks. In this letter, we show that utilizing a pattern reconfigurable antenna-array (PRAA) at user equipment (UE) can enhance the coverage both in uplink and downlink. We demonstrate that increasing the number of isotropic antennas at UE is insufficient, and propose using a simplified PRAA with 3 modes to boost the signal-to-noise ratio by <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.4-4.4$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dB. The proposed PRAA design guarantees full spatial coverage and keeps a low overhead of beam-sweeping. Also, we show the benefits of PRAA on detecting the synchronization signal block.