Interference mitigation using random antenna selection in millimeter wave beamforming system

In multi-user beamforming systems, the inter-user interference are controlled by spatial filtering. Since the implementation of digital beamforming is difficult due to high hardware cost of large array system, the analog beamforming system with one phase shifter at each antenna element is considered with antenna selection scheme. However, the beamwidth is not sufficiently narrow to perfectly remove the interference due to limited size of antenna arrays. To mitigate the interference, we propose the random antenna selection system in millimeter wave channel. The random antenna selection expands the effective array size so that the beamwidth becomes narrow. We compare the beamwidth of conventional fixed antenna selection with random antenna selection and analyze the amount of interference for each selection scheme. Theoretical analysis and bit error rate simulation results indicate that the beamforming with random antenna selection can take advantage of large array.