Energy-Efficient Design of Broad Beams for Massive MIMO Systems

Massive MIMO is a promising air interface technology for 5G wireless communications. Such antenna systems offer capabilities to utilize channel correlations to create beams suitable for user specific transmissions. Most of the prior research is devoted to user-specific transmission in such systems, where a narrow beam is formed towards a user to improve its reception. Meanwhile, public-channel transmission to multiple users at once by means of broad beams has been understudied. In this paper, we introduce the concept of array-size invariant (ASI) beamforming, enabling generation of broad beams from very large antenna arrays where all elements are transmitting at maximum power. The ASI technique offers the possibility to achieve a perfectly flat array factor by exploiting the additional degree of freedom coming from the dual-polarization beamforming. The proposed technique is applicable to both uniform linear and rectangular arrays. The benefits of the method are shown by means of several numerical examples. In particular, the practical usefulness of the ASI beamforming, in terms of coverage and energy efficiency, is illustrated on an example of designing a cell-specific broad beam for public-channel transmission in a realistic network deployment.