5G beamforming implementation and trade-off investigation of cylindrical array arrangements

In this paper, we study the performance of a 5G network working at mmW range for the uplink. We consider a single base station scenario equipped with a cylindrical array and a circular array (which can be seen as a single ring cylindrical array), isotropic and directive antenna elements are taken into account and we evaluate the trade-off between antennas per ring and number of rings with fixed number of total antennas. Users are modeled as a spatial Binomial point process in a hexagonal cell. As beamforming techniques, Conventional and Capon algorithms have been considered. As main KPI to evaluate system performance, we consider average achievable per-user rate with different system configurations, such as network loading. The key result of the trade-off investigation is that, when the radius of the cell is much larger than the height of the base station, the best performance occurs when the cylindrical array degenerates in a circular array both when users lay at ground level and with random heights.