mmWave Massive Analog Relay MIMO for Improvement of Channel Capacity

Recently, due to the increase in mobile traffic, further demand for channel capacity is expected. By using the millimeter-wave band in 5G (5th generation mobile communication system), large-capacity communication can be realized by using a wider band than 4G/LTE. In addition, the antenna miniaturization makes it possible to install multi- element antennas on moving objects such as cars and buses. In the near future, automated driving will bring about new services such as viewing 4K/8K videos and satellite office. In order to deal with such use cases, it is necessary to realize large- capacity communication by massive MIMO transmission from a base station to a single user. However, there is a problem that the channel capacity is not expected to be improved by single-user (SU) massive MIMO using millimeter waves due to the large path loss in the millimeter wave band and high channel correlation. In this paper, we propose the mmWave Massive Analog Relay MIMO system that uses a large number of analog relay stations (RSs) to generate artificial propagation paths. Compared with the conventional method from the viewpoint of channel capacity and number of streams by changing the arrangement of these relay nodes. The effectiveness of the proposed method is reported by numerical simulation.