Open-source End-to-End Digital Beamforming System Modeling

Abstract: Digital beamforming forms the foundation for massive MIMO in 6G wireless communications. At their core, digital beamforming architectures provide key benefits such as faster beam search, interference nulling via zero-force beamforming, higher spectral capacity, and more increased flexibility. However, they generally tradeoff power consumption due to the large number of ADCs in such systems. This paper introduces an open-source MATLAB-based behavioral hardware model of a general digital beamforming system. More specifically, it models an end-to-end uplink between an arbitrary number of user elements (UEs) and an arbitrarily large base station (BS) with and without a strong interferer. This paper also presents and validates an equation-based model for the effects of interference on thermal and quantization noise. The behavioral model presented in this paper aims to deepen understanding of such digital beamforming systems to enable system designers to make optimizations. The results presented in this paper primarily center on implementations with low-resolution ADCs and, thus, focus on the effects of system parameters, including interferer strength, on quantization noise.