Hierarchical-Absolute Reciprocity Calibration for Millimeter-wave Hybrid Beamforming Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical calibration method for millimeter-wave hybrid beamforming systems to address reciprocity mismatch, reducing complexity and improving estimation accuracy through a decoupled approach and analytical bounds.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hierarchical calibration framework with closed-form and iterative solutions for digital and analog chains, respectively, enhancing calibration efficiency in mmWave HBF systems.

Findings

The digital mismatch coefficients can be estimated perfectly.

The proposed method reduces calibration overhead and complexity.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the calibration approach.

Abstract

In time-division duplexing (TDD) millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the reciprocity mismatch severely degrades the performance of the hybrid beamforming (HBF). In this work, to mitigate the detrimental effect of the reciprocity mismatch, we investigate reciprocity calibration for the mmWave-HBF system with a fully-connected phase shifter network. To reduce the overhead and computational complexity of reciprocity calibration, we first decouple digital radio frequency (RF) chains and analog RF chains with beamforming design. Then, the entire calibration problem of the HBF system is equivalently decomposed into two subproblems corresponding to the digital-chain calibration and analog-chain calibration. To solve the calibration problems efficiently, a closed-form solution to the digital-chain calibration problem is derived, while an iterative-alternating optimization algorithm for the analog-chain calibration problem is proposed. To measure the performance of the proposed algorithm, we derive the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound on the errors in estimating mismatch coefficients. The results reveal that the estimation errors of mismatch coefficients of digital and analog chains are uncorrelated, and that the mismatch coefficients of receive digital chains can be estimated perfectly. Simulation results are presented to validate the analytical results and to show the performance of the proposed calibration approach.