Near-Optimal Design for Hybrid Beamforming in mmWave Massive Multi-User MIMO Systems

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems can obtain sufficient beamforming gains to combat severe path loss in signal propagation. The hybrid (analog/digital) beamforming with multiple data streams can be utilized to further improve mmWave spectral efficiency. In this paper, we focus on the hybrid beamforming design of a downlink mmWave massive multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) system based on full-connected structure, and aim to maximize the sum rate of the overall system as an objective function. In the analog beamforming stage, a piecewise successive iterative approximation (PSIA) algorithm is proposed to design the analog beamformer and combiner. This algorithm not only has a linear property, but also can obtain closed-form solutions. In the digital beamforming stage, the piecewise successive approximation method is utilized to design the digital beamforming based on the criterion to avoid the loss of information, which can help reduce the computational complexity and is also implemented simply. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves good sum-rate performance in the mmWave massive MU-MIMO system, and outperforms the state-of-the art MIMO hybrid beamforming design schemes, even when the number of base station antennas is not very large.

Keywords

• Millimeter wave
• massive MIMO
• multi-user
• hybrid beamforming
• sum rate