Hybrid Precoder and Combiner Design with Low Resolution Phase Shifters in mmWave MIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops practical hybrid precoding and combining algorithms for mmWave MIMO systems using low-resolution phase shifters, including one-bit resolution, to reduce hardware costs while maintaining high spectral efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces an iterative design algorithm for low-resolution hybrid beamforming and extends it to one-bit phase shifters and multiuser systems, addressing hardware efficiency.

Findings

Proposed algorithms outperform existing low-resolution designs.

Effective spectral efficiency achieved with one-bit phase shifters.

Algorithms are computationally feasible for large antenna arrays.

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications have been considered as a key technology for next generation cellular systems and Wi-Fi networks because of its advances in providing orders-of-magnitude wider bandwidth than current wireless networks. Economical and energy efficient analog/digial hybrid precoding and combining transceivers have been often proposed for mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to overcome the severe propagation loss of mmWave channels. One major shortcoming of existing solutions lies in the assumption of infinite or high-resolution phase shifters (PSs) to realize the analog beamformers. However, low-resolution PSs are typically adopted in practice to reduce the hardware cost and power consumption. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we investigate the practical design of hybrid precoders and combiners with low-resolution PSs in mmWave MIMO systems. In particular, we propose an iterative algorithm which successively designs the low-resolution analog precoder and combiner pair for each data stream, aiming at conditionally maximizing the spectral efficiency. Then, the digital precoder and combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband channel to further enhance the spectral efficiency. In an effort to achieve an even more hardware-efficient large antenna array, we also investigate the design of hybrid beamformers with one-bit resolution (binary) PSs, and present a novel binary analog precoder and combiner optimization algorithm with quadratic complexity in the number of antennas. The proposed low-resolution hybrid beamforming design is further extended to multiuser MIMO communication systems. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed algorithms compared to existing low-resolution hybrid beamforming designs, particularly for the one-bit resolution PS scenario.