Oversampling transmit and receive antenna arrays

Abstract

A dense antenna array architecture is developed to ease the circuit requirements of the radio frequency (RF) front-end in beamforming applications. In the architecture, antennas are spaced more closely than would otherwise be required to exploit the available degrees of freedom. Such an array structure is analogous to temporally oversampled data conversion systems, which have reduced quantizer resolution requirements. For a linear, uniformly-spaced array, we develop a spatial-domain version of ΔΣ quantization, and show that with binary quantization for the in-phase and quadrature components of antenna weights, even relatively modest amounts of oversampling can reproduce beamforming patterns of interest to practically useful levels of accuracy.