MIMO techniques and architectures for millimeter wave mobile communications

Exploiting high carrier frequencies for mobile communications is a fundamental enabler to cope with the always increasing throughput demand. In fact, millimeter wave (mmWave) bands offer huge portions of spectrum that can be used to deliver very high data rates from or toward the mobile users. When compared to current 4G systems working at frequencies below 6 GHz, mmWave base stations and users are expected to be equipped with many more antennas because of the reduced antenna element size. Therefore, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding either in the form of beamforming or spatial multiplexing will be used, but which MIMO scheme at these high carrier frequencies represents the best trade off in terms of energy consumption, cost and performance, is still under investigation.