A sidelobe suppression technique for millimeter wave beamforming

Abstract

Due to the millimeter wave's high path loss, beamforming is required to provide higher gain. Conventional beamformer is widely used for its simplicity in many other studies. However, it is vulnerable to unexpected interferences since it has high level of sidelobes. This paper proposes a new beamformer which can be used to make an interference-robust codebook for receivers. The idea of the new method is to null out sidelobes of conventional beamformer by using the linear constraint minimum variance (LCMV) beamformer algorithm. It modifies the original LCMV beamformer to be applicable to the analog beamformer. To compare its performance with conventional beamformer, an empirical millimeter wave channel model was used. Results show a significant increase in signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) on the general millimeter wave environment.