Jammer Mitigation via Beam-Slicing for Low-Resolution mmWave Massive MU-MIMO

TL;DR

This paper introduces beam-slicing, a novel analog spatial transform technique that significantly enhances jammer mitigation in low-resolution mmWave massive MU-MIMO systems, enabling higher user service rates.

Contribution

The paper proposes beam-slicing, a new method for mitigating jammer interference in low-resolution mmWave MU-MIMO systems, and demonstrates its effectiveness with two digital detectors, SNIPS and CHOPS.

Findings

Beam-slicing enables serving 65% of UEs versus 2% without it.

SNIPS and CHOPS effectively mitigate jammer impact with beam-slicing.

Beam-slicing focuses jammer energy onto few ADCs, improving data recovery.

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) promises unprecedented data rates for next-generation wireless systems. To be practically viable, mmWave massive MU-MIMO basestations (BSs) must rely on low-resolution data converters which leaves them vulnerable to jammer interference. This paper proposes beam-slicing, a method that mitigates the impact of a permanently transmitting jammer during uplink transmission for BSs equipped with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). Beam-slicing is a localized analog spatial transform that focuses the jammer energy onto few ADCs, so that the transmitted data can be recovered based on the outputs of the interference-free ADCs. We demonstrate the efficacy of beam-slicing in combination with two digital jammer-mitigating data detectors: SNIPS and CHOPS. Soft-Nulling of Interferers with Partitions in Space (SNIPS) combines beam-slicing with a soft-nulling data detector that exploits knowledge of the ADC contamination; projeCtion onto ortHOgonal complement with Partitions in Space (CHOPS) combines beam-slicing with a linear projection that removes all signal components co-linear to an estimate of the jammer channel. Our results show that beam-slicing enables SNIPS and CHOPS to successfully serve 65% of the user equipments (UEs) for scenarios in which their antenna-domain counterparts that lack beam-slicing are only able to serve 2% of the UEs.