Design of a multimode beamforming network based on the scattering matrix analysis

The investigation of the multimode beamforming network （BFN） has been developed from its scattering matrix （S-matrix） analysis. A substrate integrated waveguide （SIW） BFN is designed and fabricated on a single Rogers 5880 substrate. This device is not only marked by features of conventional BFN, such as Butler matrix, but also has additional benefits, e.g. more compact configuration and higher radiation efficiency. Measured and simulated results based on the proposed structure are in a good agreement, which indicates that this novel type of BFN has good characteristics and presents an excellent candidate in the development of intelligent microwave and millimeter-wave multibeam antenna systems.

A Novel Beamforming Emulating Photonic Nanojets for Wireless Relay Networks

In this article,a low-cost electromagnetic structure emulating photonic nanojets is utilized to improve the efficiency of wireless relay networks.The spectral element method,due to its high accuracy,is used to verify the efficiency of the proposed structure by solving the associate field distribution.The application of optimal single-relay selection method shows that full diversity gain with low complexity can be achieved.In this paper,the proposed technique using smart relays combines the aforementioned two methods to attain the benefits of both methods by achieving the highest coding and diversity gain and enhances the overall network performance in terms of bit error rate(BER).Moreover,we analytically prove the advantage of using the proposed technique.In our simulations,it can be shown that the proposed technique outperforms the best known state-of-the-art single relay selection technique.Furthermore,the BER expressions obtained from the theoretical analysis are perfectly matched to those obtained from the conducted simulations.

50 GHz optical true time delay beamforming in hybrid optical/mm-wave access networks with multi-core optical fiber distribution

We propose and experimentally validate an optical true time delay beamforming scheme with straightforward integration into hybrid optical/millimeter（mm）-wave access networks. In the proposed approach, the most complex functions, including the beamforming network, are implemented in a central office, reducing the complexity and cost of remote antenna units. Different cores in a multi-core fiber are used to distribute the modulated signals to high-speed photodetectors acting as heterodyne mixers. The mm-wave carrier frequency is fixed to 50 GHz（VBand）, thereby imposing a progressive delay between antenna elements of a few picoseconds. That true time delay is achieved with an accuracy lower than 1 ps and low phase noise.

Joint load balancing and interference coordination in multi-antenna heterogeneous networks

In heterogeneous networks（Het Nets）, it is desirable to offload users from macro cells to small cells to achieve load balancing. However, the offloaded users suffer a strong inter-tier interference. To guarantee the performance of the offloaded users, the interference from macro cells should be carefully managed. In this paper, we jointly optimize load balancing and interference coordination in multi-antenna Het Nets. Different from previous works, instead of almost blank subframes（ABS） on which the macro cells waste time resource, the macro cells suppress the interference to the offloaded users by zero-forcing beamforming（ZFBF） on interference nulling subframes（INS）. Considering user association cannot be conduct frequently, we derive the long-term throughput of users over Rayleigh fading channels while previous works focused on instantaneous rate. From the perspective of the spectrum efficiency and user fairness, we formulate a long-term network-wide utility maximization problem. By decomposing the problem into two subproblems, we propose an efficient joint load balancing and interference coordination strategy. Simulation results show that our proposal can achieve good system performance gains over counterparts in term of the network utility, cell edge throughput and average throughput.