Beam-Slicing for Jammer Mitigation in mmWave Massive MU-MIMO

TL;DR

This paper introduces SNIPS, a beam-slicing technique combined with soft-nulling, to mitigate jammer interference in mmWave massive MU-MIMO systems with low-resolution ADCs, significantly improving user service rates.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel beam-slicing method with soft-nulling for jammer mitigation in low-resolution mmWave MU-MIMO, demonstrating substantial performance gains over existing approaches.

Findings

SNIPS can serve 65% of UEs under jammer interference.

Conventional soft-nulling serves only 2% of UEs in similar scenarios.

Beam-slicing effectively concentrates jammer energy onto fewer ADCs.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology promises unprecedentedly high data rates for next-generation wireless systems. To be practically viable, mmWave massive MU-MIMO basestations (BS) must (i) rely on low-resolution data-conversion and (ii) be robust to jammer interference. This paper considers the problem of mitigating the impact of a permanently transmitting jammer during uplink transmission to a BS equipped with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To this end, we propose SNIPS, short for Soft-Nulling of Interferers with Partitions in Space. SNIPS combines beam-slicing---a localized, analog spatial transform that focuses the jammer energy onto a subset of all ADCs---together with a soft-nulling data detector that exploits knowledge of which ADCs are contaminated by jammer interference. Our numerical results show that SNIPS is able to successfully serve 65% of the user equipments (UEs) for scenarios in which a conventional antenna-domain soft-nulling data detector is only able to serve 2% of the UEs.