The throughput performance of intelligently shaped and fixed analog elevation beam patterns in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) base stations with hybrid beamforming (HBF) is assessed for the first time. Distinct spatially heterogeneous user distributions (i.e., uniform, near-site, cell-edge, and weighted uniform and near-site) and propagation environments (i.e., line-of-sight (LoS) with multipath and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) with multipath) are considered. The cosecant-squared and flat-top shaped beam patterns are compared to the benchmark pencil beam pattern with a straightforward electrical downtilt. The LoS simulation results show that in case of unknown weight of user distribution scenarios, the cosecant-squared pattern is the most robust, with a gain of up to 16% in the average system throughput and up to 34% in the 90th percentile user throughout compared to the benchmark. If the near-site case has a greater probability of occurrence than the uniform user distribution (e.g., due to daily events and festivals), the flat-top pattern becomes preferable. In the NLoS scenario, the considered HBF architectures with elevation beam pattern shaping do not bring any performance disadvantages compared to the benchmark HBF.

Hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture provides promising trade-offs between the system performance and computational/hardware complexity in practical implementations of millimeter wave (mm-Wave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) 5th generation (5G) mobile networks compared to its fully digital beamforming (DBF) counterpart. In this thesis, we investigate the future applicability of deploying hybrid beamforming architectures with subarray beam pattern shaping for mm-Wave 5G base stations in spatially heterogeneous user distributions and different propagation scenarios. We propose HBF structures with a cosecant-squared pattern and a flat-top pattern as well as their HBF and DBF benchmarks. In addition to the uniform user distribution, three non-uniform user distributions, i.e., the near-site distribution, the cell-center distribution, and the cell-edge distribution are proposed to represent the traffic flow and mobility of users due to festivals and holidays. We evaluate the performance in a novel 5G new radio (NR) system-level simulation (SLS) model. Numerical results show that the HBF architecture with a cosecant-squared subarray beam pattern is more robust against differences in spatially heterogeneous traffics than the flat-top HBF and benchmark HBF under the line-of-sight (LoS) propagation scenario. Under the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) propagation scenario, more deterministic environment information and radio channel modeling are required to improve the system performance of the shaped HBF beamforming technique.