Two-Layer Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC)-aided Multi-user MISO Networks

Abstract: Microwave linear analog computer (MiLAC)-aided transmit beamforming, which processes transmitted symbols entirely in the analog domain, has recently emerged as a promising alternative to fully digital or hybrid beamforming architectures for single-user multi-antenna systems. However, recent studies have shown that deploying a single lossless and reciprocal MiLAC at the transmitter cannot achieve the same capacity as fully digital beamforming in multi-user scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-layer MiLAC-aided beamforming architecture at the transmitter for a downlink multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) network. Leveraging microwave network theory, we first prove that lossless and reciprocal two-layer MiLAC-aided beamforming can achieve the same performance as digital beamforming, and we derive a closed-form mapping from digital beamforming to two-layer MiLAC analog beamforming. Furthermore, we formulate a sum-rate maximization problem and develop an efficient optimization framework to jointly optimize the power allocation and the scattering matrices for the proposed two-layer MiLAC architecture. Numerical results validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that two-layer MiLAC achieves the same sum-rate performance as fully digital beamforming.