2020 12th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing
(CSNDSP)
Digital Beamforming Techniques for Future
Communications Systems
Gordana Barb, Marius Otesteanu, Florin Alexa, Ana Ghiulai
Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications, ”Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Romania
gordana.barb@student.upt.ro, marius.otesteanu@upt.ro, florin.alexa@upt.ro, ana.ghiulai@student.upt.ro
Abstract—5G is the next mobile generation that will support
the need for more data applications, higher speeds, more
capacity, lower latency and increased performance. New cellular
architectures and technologies are being investigated in order
to meet the growing demand for wireless services. One example
is the use of beamforming. Beamforming is a signal processing
technique used to direct the transmission or reception of signals.
Directional beamforming is produced by adjusting the elements
of each antenna vector, until an optimal gain is obtained. The
main contributions of this paper consist on the evaluation
of the performance of a 5G communication system, using
massive MIMO technology embedded with digital beamforming
techniques. A comparison of two digital beamforming methods
proposed for future 5G systems, EBB and GoB beamforming,
is assessed.
Index Terms—Mobile communication systems, 5G, beamform-
ing, GoB, EBB, throughput, BER
I. I NTRODUCTION
The 5th Generation (5G) is the next generation of mobile
communications, which is currently under development but
is expected to be available for commercial use by 2020.
Unlike the previous mobile generations, 5G will revolutionize
our society and the way we live, by connecting a massive
number of users and machines, support new applications
and accommodate the emerging technologies [1]. The key
performance requirements for 5G are already established and
consist of increased data transfer rates, spectral efficiency,
energy efficiency, user mobility, traffic capacity and lower
latency [2]. Furthermore, there are 3 major use-cases defined
for 5G: enhanced mobile broadband, massive machine-type
communication and ultra-reliable and low latency communi-
cation. In order to reach the proposed requirements for 5G,
the actual technologies and architectures are not suitable, and
new ones need to be investigated. Hence, the use of a higher
number of antennas at both the transmitter and receiver with
beamforming techniques represent one of the key technologies
that will allow 5G to reach the defined requirements [3], [4].
Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) is a radio commu-
nication technology that is increasingly being used in actual
communication systems. The MIMO configuration is defined
as having multiple antennas, both at the transmitter and at
the receiver side. The transmission of multiple data streams
simultaneously leads to an increase on spectral efficiency. At
the present, most MIMO systems are composed of up to 8
antennas [5]. Massive MIMO is defined by using a much
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higher number of antennas than regular MIMO, comprising up
to 100 antennas, and it is expected to be one of the key enablers
for 5G communication systems alongside with beamforming
schemes [6], [7].
Beamforming is a signal processing technique used in sen-
sor vectors to direct the transmission or reception of signals.
Directional beamforming occurs by adjusting the elements of
each vector, until an optimal gain is obtained [8].
The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the perfor-
mance of a 5G communication system, in terms of BER and
throughput, using massive MIMO and digital beamforming
techniques - grid of beams beamforming and eigen based
beamforming - envisioned for 5G. Significant contributions
include the evaluation of the adopted system’s performance,
with a comparison of the digital beamforming techniques pro-
posed to be used for the future mobile communication systems.
Additionally, simulation results provide a better understanding
on the behavior of the investigated beamforming techniques on
5G communication systems.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows, Section
II presents the concept of beamforming, Sections III and IV
describe the grid of beams beamforming and eigen based
beamforming techniques, Section V provides the simulation
parameters adopted for this work and Section VI presents the
simulation results and analysis. Lastly, Section VII outlines
the conclusion of this paper.
II. B EAMFORMING
Beamforming is used for transmitting and receiving the
directional signals. This technique has the role of changing
the amplitude and phase in order to direct the beam in the
desired direction [8]. The beamforming technique occurs by
adjusting the elements of each vector, until an optimal gain is
achieved. There are three different types of beamforming:
• Analog beamforming: phase shifters are used to send
the same signal from multiple antennas, although with
different phases. The amplitude and phase variation are
applied to the analog signal at the transmitter end. Signals
from different antennas are summed before the Analog-
to-Digital Conversion (ADC) at the end of the receiver.
• Digital beamforming: different signals are formed for
each antenna in the base band. Precoding is considered
to be equivalent to digital beamforming. The amplitude
and phase variation are applied to the digital signal before
 2020 12th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing
(CSNDSP)

the Digital-to-Analog Conversion (DAC) at the end of the

transmission.
• Hybrid beamforming: results by combining the different
phases in the analog domain, together with the beam for-
mation by digital beamforming in the base band domain
[9]- [11].
For this paper, we focused on the study of two digital
beamforming methods for 5G communication systems: grid
of beams beamforming and eigen based beamforming, which
are described individually below.
Fig. 2: Example scheme of the GoB beam network [12].
III. G RID OF B EAMS B EAMFORMING
The concept of Grid of Beams (GoB) beamforming is respectively. The matrix can be single or dual polarized. Figure
that all the transmission flows, represented by the Quadrature 3 shows an example. The two colors, red and blue, represent
Amplitude Modulation (QAM) symbols dn , with n = 1, 2 ,...,N, the two polarization directions for the antennas, vertical and
which must be sent on the same time-frequency allocation, horizontal, respectively.
are weighted at Base Station (BS) with precoding vectors Pn .
Pn are the elements of a limited set of predefined vectors,
constituting the fixed beams.
Each beam is sent in a polarizing direction. Figure 1 shows
the basic principle of the transmission scheme. The precoding
matrix represented in the figure is P = [P1 ,...,Pn ].

Fig. 3: Uniform rectangular matrix of antennas arrangement

[14].

A graphical description of the beam formation is shown in

figure 4, where u0 is a column vector, which represents the
eigenvector, the eigenvalue, and ai has the role of controlling
the beam mapping. u0 is obtained by choosing the eigenvector
Fig. 1: Transmission scheme for GoB beamforming [12]. corresponding to the strongest eigenvalue. ai has the role
of controlling the beam mapping in the two polarization
The Pn vectors are precoded so that a beam network is directions. The same vector is applied to the two
 polarization
formed. Figure 2 shows a set of eight different beams that 1 0
directions (horizontal and vertical): ai = .
exhibit a certain spatial separation. The allocation of the beams 0 1
to the users must be made according to the location of the
respective user in the cell. Beam subgroups will be designed
so that intracellular interference is minimized. For example,
beams #1 and #5 could build a suitable combination. That is,
two users who prefer these beams are candidates to be pro-
grammed together on the same Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiple Access (OFDMA) allocation. The assignment of the
beam index is performed at the BS. The Mobile Station (MS)
can determine the beams chosen by measuring and evaluating
the test signals on downlink, which are sent for each precoding
vector.

IV. E IGEN BASED B EAMFORMING

With the Eigen Based Beamforming (EBB) method, the
precoding matrix for any user is obtained from the de-
composition of the single values. The BS is modeled by a
uniform rectangular matrix, where the distance between the
vertical and horizontal antennas is represented by dV and dH ,
Fig. 4: Eigen based beamforming [14].
V. S IMULATION PARAMETERS
In this section we present the simulation parameters adopted
for this work. A single-user downlink MIMO system is con-

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 2020 12th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing
(CSNDSP)

sidered, consisting of 1 BS, equipped with 64 transmitting beamfoming, the error rate is lower than for EBB, for the
antennas and 1 MS equipped with 4 receiving antennas, same values of SNIR. For example, for a SNIR of 10 dB, the
moving at a speed of 3 km/h. The carrier frequency allocated BER is 10−2 , while for EBB it only reaches a minimum of
is 3.5 GHz, with a bandwidth of 100 MHz. A number of 256 approximately 10−1 , with a difference of 10 between both.
Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) are allocated, and the duplex Regarding throughput, it can be seen in figure 6 that for
mode used is Time Division Duplex (TDD). The channel GoB beamforming, the maximum value of 620 Mbps is
adopted is the Extended Pedestrian A (EPA) channel model. reached sooner than for the EBB, with a difference of 7 dB.
In order to analyze the performance of the two 5G digital Nevertheless, the maximum value for EBB is slightly higher
beamforming techniques discussed in the sections above, grid than for GoB beamforming, with a difference of 30 Mbps.
of beams beamforming and eigen-based beamforming, we
studied the Bit Error Rate (BER), which offers the number
of erroneous bits per unit of time, and the throughput, which
represents the rate of messages delivered successfully in
a communication channel. The simulations were performed
using Nokia’s link-level 5GMax simulator.
We considered two different scenarios, one with 64-QAM
modulation and one with 256-QAM modulation. Nevertheless,
for both modulation schemes, we have selected the maximum
values for the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), in
order to obtain maximum values for the throughput, according
to 3GPP TS 136.213. As for the Signal-to-Interference-Plus-
Noise Ratio (SNIR) range, we have chosen up to 35 dB for
both scenarios, since the recommended minimum values for
transmitting data is approximately 20 dB and our purpose is
to simulate a real environment. Table 1 depicts the scenarios
adopted.
Fig. 6: Throughput comparison between GoB and EBB using
64-QAM modulation.

The second comparison is also between EBB and GoB

TABLE I: Scenarios adopted for the link-level simulations.
VI. S IMULATION R ESULTS & A NALYSIS
In this section we present the link-level simulation results
and analysis. Primarily, we have performed the comparison
between the two digital beamforming methods when using
64-QAM modulation and latter with 256-QAM modulation.
Regarding BER, it is observed in figure 5 that for GoB
beamforming, when using 256-QAM modulation. Figure 7
depicts BER results and figure 8 throughput results. Regarding
BER, we can observe that for the GoB beamforming, the error
rate is lower than for the EBB, showing a similar behavior with
64-QAM modulation. For example, for a SNIR of 15 dB, for
GoB beamforming, the error rate is approximately 10−2 , while
for EBB the error rate is greater than 10−1 .

Fig. 7: BER comparison between GoB and EBB using 256-

QAM modulation.

Regarding throughput, we can observe that for GoB beam-

Fig. 5: BER comparison between GoB and EBB using 64- forming the maximum value is reached faster than for the
QAM modulation. EBB. For a SNIR of 23 dB, the maximum value of 820 Mbps

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 2020 12th International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing
(CSNDSP)
is already achieved with GoB beamforming, while with EBB
the maximum value is reached with a difference of 7 dB. When
compared to 64-QAM modulation, there is an increase of 200
Mbps on the maximum throughput achieved.
Fig. 8: Throughput comparison between GoB and EBB using
256-QAM modulation.
VII. C ONCLUSION
The main purpose of this paper consisted on the study of
an adaptive system model intended for applications that make
use of 5G mobile communications and to understand the effect
of two approaches of digital beamforming techniques on the
system performance - EBB and GoB beamforming. Link-level
simulations were performed using Nokia’s internal simulator,
5GMax, in terms of BER and throughput.
It can be observed that when using 64-QAM modulation
and GoB breamfoming, BER reaches the minimum value and
stabilizes at a SNIR of 15 dB and for EBB at SNIR of 24 dB.
For 256-QAM modulation, BER stabilizes at a SNIR of 21
dB for GoB beamforming and at a SNIR of 30 dB for EBB.
For both modulation schemes, the difference on the SNIR
between EBB and GoB beamforming is identical and equal to
9 dB. As for throughput, the maximum value obtained with 64-
QAM modulation is approx. 620 Mbps, while for 256-QAM
modulation there is an increase of 32%, reaching up to 820
Mbps. However, for the last case, higher values for the SNIR
are needed to reach maximum throughput, which translate to
better environment conditions.
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In conclusion, we observed that for both modulation
schemes investigated in this paper, 64-QAM and 256-QAM
modulation, the use of grid of beams beamforming leads to
an overall improved performance on the 5G system compared
to the use of eigen based beamforming.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was developed using Nokia’s 5G simulator.
Hence, the authors wish to acknowledge the support given
by Nokia.
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