Time-to-Space Division Multiplexing for Tb/s Mobile Cells

Space division multiplexing increases the capacity of mobile cells by reusing the frequencies in various directions. Yet, today’s concepts scale badly to millimeter wave and therefore cannot provide Tb/s capacity. In this paper, we introduce time-to-space division multiplexing as a novel scheme to steer multiple beams simultaneously to different users. The main benefit of the proposed method relies in the fact that simple hardware can be used to generate the beams. In other words, it provides the advantages of space division multiplexing without relying on the complex array feeders that are usually required. Thanks to this advantage, the proposed technique can be easily combined with millimeter Wave systems as recently demonstrated.