Cooperative 3D Beamforming for Small-Cell and Cell-Free 6G Systems

Abstract: Three dimensional (3D) resource reuse is an important design requirement for the prospective 6G wireless communication systems. Hence, we propose a cooperative 3D beamformer for use in 3D space. Explicitly, we harness multiple base station antennas for joint zero forcing transmit pre-coding for beaming the transmit signals in specific 3D directions. The technique advocated is judiciously configured for use in both cell-based and cell-free wireless architectures. We evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme using the novel metric of Volumetric Spectral Efficiency (VSE). We also characterized the performance of the scheme in terms of its spectral efficiency (SE) and Bit Error Rate (BER) through extensive simulation studies.