Tri-Hybrid Beamforming for Radiation-Center Reconﬁgurable Antenna Array - Spectral Efﬁciency and Energy Efﬁciency

Sep 5, 2026

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This paper proposes a tri-hybrid beamforming (THBF) architecture for a radiation-center (RC) reconﬁgurable antenna array (RCRAA), combining digital, analog, and electromagnetic (EM) beamforming. The EM beamformer is designed as an RC selection mechanism. For spectral-efficiency (SE) maximization under hardware and power constraints, a tri-loop alternating optimization (TLAO) scheme is developed with penalty dual decomposition and outer-loop coordinate descent for RC selection. For energy-efficiency (EE) maximization, dual quadratic transform-based fractional programming (DQTFP) is formulated, then a complexity-reduced Lagrange dual transform-based method (LDTFP) is proposed with closed-form per-iteration updates. Simulations confirm improved SE and EE and show LDTFP’s reduced complexity with only minor performance loss.

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Tri-Hybrid Beamforming for Radiation-Center Reconﬁgurable Antenna Array: Spectral Efﬁciency and Energy Efﬁciency Yinchen Li, Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Chenhao Qi, Senior Member, IEEE, Shiwen Mao, Fellow, IEEE, and Octavia A. Dobre, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—In this paper, we propose a tri-hybrid beamforming (THBF) architecture based on the radiation-center (RC) reconﬁgurable antenna array (RCRAA), including the digital beamforming, analog beamforming, and electromagnetic (EM) beamforming, where the EM beamformer design is modeled as RC selection. Aiming at spectral efﬁciency (SE) maximization subject to the hardware and power consumption constraints, we propose a tri-loop alternating optimization (TLAO) scheme for the THBF design, where the digital and analog beamformers are optimized based on the penalty dual decomposition in the inner and middle loops, and the RC selection is determined through the coordinate descent method in the outer loop. Aiming at energy-efﬁciency (EE) maximization, we develop a dual quadratic transform-based fractional programming (DQTFP) scheme, where the TLAO scheme is readily used for the THBF design. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose the Lagrange dual transform-based fractional programming (LDTFP) scheme, where each iteration has a closed-form solution. Simulation results demonstrate the great potential of the RCRAAin improving both SE and EE. Compared to the DQTFP scheme, the LDTFP scheme signiﬁcantly reduces the computational complexity with only minor performance loss. Index Terms—Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, multiuser communications, radiation-center (RC) selection, reconﬁgurable antenna array, tri-hybrid beamforming (THBF). I. INTRODUCTION THE future wireless systems are expected to support abundant emerging applications, such as autonomous vehicles, digital twins, and space-air-ground-sea integrated networks [2], [3] . To meet the unprecedented communication demands for ultra-high data rate and ultra-low latency, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications have received widespread interest from both industry and academia [2] . The Received 13 August 2025; revised 11 December 2025 and 21 January 2026; accepted 1 February 2026 . Date of publication 11 February 2026; date of current version 20 February 2026 . This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U22B2007 and Grant 62571124 . An earlier version of this paper was presented in part at the IEEE Global Communications Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, December 2025 [1] . The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was L. Dai. (Corresponding author: Chenhao Qi.) Yinchen Li and Chenhao Qi are with the School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: [liyinchen@seu.edu.cn](liyinchen@seu.edu.cn); [qch@seu.edu.cn](qch@seu.edu.cn)). Shiwen Mao is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849 USA (e-mail: [smao@ieee.org](smao@ieee.org)). Octavia A. Dobre is with the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University, St. John's, NL A1C 5S7, Canada, and also with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Gyeonggi-do 17104, South Korea (e-mail: [odobre@mun.ca](odobre@mun.ca)) . Digital Object Identiﬁer 10.1109/TWC.2026.3661280 short wavelength of mmWave signal facilitates the miniaturization of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) arrays, making it feasible to compensate for the high path loss and support parallel transmission of multiple data streams [4] . However, the ever-increasing array size poses signiﬁcant challenges in terms of hardware complexity and power consumption, leading to substantial difﬁculties for practical deployment. Although the extensively investigated hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture can mitigate this challenge through reducing the number

FAQs

What is the proposed tri-hybrid beamforming architecture and how is it implemented?

The paper proposes THBF based on a radiation-center reconﬁgurable antenna array, integrating digital, analog, and electromagnetic beamforming, where the EM beamformer design is modeled as RC selection.

How is spectral efficiency (SE) maximized under hardware and power constraints?

A tri-loop alternating optimization (TLAO) scheme is used: digital and analog beamformers are optimized via penalty dual decomposition in inner and middle loops, while RC selection is determined by coordinate descent in the outer loop.

How does the proposed approach improve energy efficiency (EE) and reduce computational complexity?

Energy-efficiency maximization is addressed by a dual quadratic transform-based fractional programming (DQTFP) scheme, and computational complexity is further reduced using a Lagrange dual transform-based fractional programming (LDTFP) method with closed-form solutions per iteration, achieving only minor performance loss.

Sep 5, 2026

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