User-Directed Analog Beamforming for Multiuser Millimeter-Wave Hybrid Array Systems

© 2017 IEEE. Beamforming design for millimeter-Wave hybrid array with the subarray structure is very challenging. There is neither known optimal solution that maximizes the sum rate capacity nor near-optimal solution. This paper proposes some low-complexity user-directed analog radio- frequency (RF) beamforming design schemes. The basic idea is to iteratively allocate different subarrays to different users such that users' channel correlation can be efficiently reduced via RF beamforming. Several new but less efficient schemes are also presented to shed light on RF beamforming design, and to serve as comparisons for the user-directed schemes. Simulation results are provided for these proposed schemes, existing ones in the literature and an upper-bound for hybird array with a fully-connected structure. The user-directed schemes demonstrate significantly better sum-rate and BER performance over other schemes, although the gap to the upperbound is still large

Low-complexity multiuser receiver for massive hybrid array mmwave communications

© 1972-2012 IEEE. In this paper, we study the low complexity reception of multiuser signals in uplink millimeter wave (mmWave) communications using a partially connected hybrid antenna array. Exploiting the mmWave channel property, we propose a low-complexity user-directed multiuser receiver with three novel schemes for allocating subarrays to users. This receiver only requires the knowledge of angles-of-Arrival (AoAs) for dominating paths and a small amount of equivalent channel information instead of perfect channel state information. For comparison, we also derive a successive interference cancellation-based solution as a performance benchmark. We design two types of reference signals with the channel estimation method to enable efficient and simple estimation for AoA and equivalent baseband channel. Also, we provide analytical results for the performance of the AoA estimation, using the lower bounds of mean square errors in line-of-sight dominated mmWave channels. The simulation results validate that the proposed channel estimation method is effective when employed in combination with a zero-forcing equalizer