A Flexible Low-Cost Hybrid Beamforming Structure for Practical Beamforming Applications

In this paper, a simplified yet flexible half-duplex hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture along with the adaptive beam scanning and direction-finding methodology for the 360° HBF system has been proposed. The structure is constructed using up to 4 units of n × 4 antenna arrays with choice of gain and coverage sector, which is powered by only 4 RF beamforming chains. In addition, the flexible beamforming structure is able to enable beamforming function of any legacy transceiver. The proposed architecture exhibits prominent advantages in reducing the hardware complexity and cost of the HBF system by 4 folds and offers the field-friendly feature with the flexible gain and coverage concept that allow only the necessary array to be installed.