A novel base station antenna (BSA) configuration is presented to mitigate degrading physical antenna effects in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, while minimizing implementation complexities. Instead of using a commonly considered single antenna panel comprising of many elements covering a wide field-of-view (FOV) of 120 degrees, $L$ tilted panels are used employing $L$ times fewer elements and $L$ times smaller FOV per panel. The spatial resolution of each panel is enhanced by employing sparse arrays with suppressed (grating-lobe) radiation outside its corresponding FOV. Therefore, more directive antenna elements can be deployed in each panel to compensate for the effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) reduction. While sectorisation reduces the antenna gain variation in 120 degrees FOV, cooperation among multiple panels in downlink beamforming is seen to be capable of inter-panel interference suppression for sum-rate enhancement. A network model is used as a multi-user (MU) MIMO simulator incorporating both antenna and channel effects. It is shown that when the number of base station antennas is ten times the number of users, the average downlink sum-rate in pure line-of-sight (LOS), rich and poor multipath environments is increased up to 60.2%, 23% and 11.1%, respectively, by multi-panel sparse arrays applying zero-forcing (ZF) precoding.

中文翻译：

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在大规模 MU-MIMO 中具有物理天线效应的多面板稀疏基站设计

提出了一种新颖的基站天线 (BSA) 配置，以减轻大规模多输入多输出 (MIMO) 系统中物理天线性能下降的影响，同时最大限度地降低实现复杂性。不是使用通常被认为包含许多元件的单天线面板，覆盖 120 度的宽视场 (FOV)，$L$ 使用倾斜面板 $L$ 元素少了几倍 $L$每个面板的 FOV 小数倍。每个面板的空间分辨率通过在其对应的 FOV 之外采用具有抑制（栅瓣）辐射的稀疏阵列而得到增强。因此，可以在每个面板中部署更多定向天线元件，以补偿有效各向同性辐射功率 (EIRP) 的降低。虽然扇区化减少了 120 度 FOV 中的天线增益变化，但下行链路波束成形中多个面板之间的合作被认为能够抑制面板间干扰以增强总速率。网络模型用作多用户 (MU) MIMO 模拟器，其中包含天线和信道效应。结果表明，当基站天线数是用户数的十倍时，纯视距（LOS）下的平均下行总和速率，