Analog-Only Beamforming for Near-Field Multiuser MIMO Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analog-only beamforming approach for near-field multiuser MIMO that simplifies system design by eliminating the need for channel estimation, achieving high energy efficiency and near-HBF sum rate performance.

Contribution

It proposes two novel AoBF schemes based on MM algorithm, one with perfect CSI and one with imperfect CSI, reducing pilot overhead and improving energy efficiency.

Findings

AoBF schemes approach HBF sum rate performance

AoBF outperforms HBF in energy efficiency

Proposed schemes effectively handle imperfect CSI

Abstract

For the existing near-field multiuser communications based on hybrid beamforming (HBF) architectures, high-quality effective channel estimation is required to obtain the channel state information (CSI) for the design of the digital beamformer. To simplify the system reconfiguration and eliminate the pilot overhead required by the effective channel estimation, we considered an analog-only beamforming (AoBF) architecture in this study. The AoBF is designed with the aim of maximizing the sum rate, which is then transformed into a problem, maximizing the power transmitted to the target user equipment (UE) and meanwhile minimizing the power leaked to the other UEs. To solve this problem, we used beam focusing and beam nulling and proposed two AoBF schemes based on the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm. First, the AoBF scheme based on perfect CSI is proposed, with the focus on the beamforming performance and regardless of the CSI acquisition. Then, the AoBF scheme based on imperfect CSI is proposed, where the low-dimensional imperfect CSI is obtained by beam sweeping based on a near-field codebook. Simulation results demonstrate that the two AoBF schemes can approach the sum rate of the HBF schemes but outperform HBF schemes in terms of energy efficiency (EE).