Wideband Beam Tracking in THz Massive MIMO Systems

Terahertz (THz) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been considered as one of the promising technologies for future 6G wireless communications. It is essential to obtain channel information by beam tracking scheme to track mobile users in THz massive MIMO systems. However, the existing beam tracking schemes designed for narrowband systems with the traditional hybrid precoding structure suffer from a severe performance loss caused by the beam split effect, and thus cannot be directly applied to wideband THz massive MIMO systems. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a beam zooming based beam tracking scheme by considering the recently proposed delay-phase precoding structure for THz massive MIMO. Specifically, we firstly prove the beam zooming mechanism to flexibly control the angular coverage of frequency-dependent beams over the whole bandwidth, i.e., the degree of the beam split effect, which can be realized by the elaborate design of time delays in the delay-phase precoding structure. Then, based on this beam zooming mechanism, we propose to track multiple user physical directions simultaneously in each time slot by generating multiple beams. The angular coverage of these beams is flexibly zoomed to adapt to the potential variation range of the user physical direction. After several time slots, the base station is able to obtain the exact user physical direction by finding out the beam with the largest user received power. Unlike traditional schemes where only one frequency-independent beam can be usually generated by one radio-frequency chain, the proposed beam zooming based beam tracking scheme can simultaneously track multiple user physical directions by using multiple frequency-dependent beams generated by one radio-frequency chain. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed scheme can achieve the near-optimal achievable sum-rate performance with low beam training overhead, which is also verified by extensive simulation results.

Automated summary

In this paper, a beam zooming based beam tracking scheme is proposed for THz massive MIMO systems, using a delay-phase precoding structure. The scheme allows the base station to simultaneously track multiple users' physical directions and achieve near-optimal achievable sum-rate performance.