Effect of Phase Shifter Quantization Error on the Performance of Millimeter Wave Beam Steering

Abstract

Beamforming technology is an effective method to build a robust link. The commonly used digital beamforming is an expensive and power consuming approach to realizing millimeter-wave transmission. This makes radio frequency(RF) beamforming, which has low cost and low power consumption due to its use of phase shifters the more feasible approach to creating stable links in the millimeter-wave band. Unfortunately, the performance of RF processing is degraded by the limited precision of digital phase shifters. In this paper, we analyze the gain loss caused by the limited precision of phase shifter in millimeter wave single stream beam steering. We deduce a theoretical relationship between the array gain loss and variance of phase error. The theoretical results are validated by the Monte Carlo simulations, which indicate that gain loss could be reduced by the increased precision of phase shifter. In practical applications, 4-bit phase shifters provide sufficient accuracy for single stream beam steering.