Extended Coprime Array Configuration Generating Large-Scale Antenna Co-Array in Massive MIMO System

Generally, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system incorporates hundreds of antennas at the base station for various attractive merits, whereas severe mutual coupling arises in the dense structure. In this paper, we introduce the sparse array configuration, coprime array, into the massive MIMO system to alleviate mutual coupling, increase the degrees of freedom (DOFs) and enhance the spatial resolution. Specifically, we propose the extended coprime array structures through two systematical schemes. One scheme is to slide one subarray of the typical augmented coprime array to decompose the interleaved subarrays and the resulting sliding extended coprime array (SECA) produces weaker mutual coupling than the traditional dense uniform linear array, especially the newly proposed super nested array and augmented nested array. Meanwhile, SECA can produce an augmented co-array with more antennas than the physical array and resultantly increase the available DOFs as well as the array aperture. The other scheme is to relocate a proper number of antennas in the generalized coprime array composed of two subarrays with a displacement, namely coprime array with displaced subarrays (CADiS), and the resulting relocating extended coprime array can further alleviate mutual coupling and enhance the consecutive co-array. Furthermore, we provide the closed-form expressions of the co-array, sliding factor, the minimum number of relocating sensors, and their corresponding positions.