Single-Carrier Modulation versus OFDM for Millimeter-Wave Wireless MIMO

This paper presents results on the achievable spectral efficiency and on the energy efficiency for a wireless multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) link operating at millimeter wave frequencies (mmWave) in a typical 5G scenario. Two different single-carrier modem schemes are considered, i.e., a traditional modulation scheme with linear equalization at the receiver, and a single-carrier modulation with cyclic prefix, frequency-domain equalization and FFT-based processing at the receiver; these two schemes are compared with a conventional MIMO-OFDM transceiver structure. Our analysis jointly takes into account the peculiar characteristics of MIMO channels at mmWave frequencies, the use of hybrid (analog-digital) pre-coding and post-coding beamformers, the finite cardinality of the modulation structure, and the non-linear behavior of the transmitter power amplifiers. Our results show that the best performance is achieved by single-carrier modulation with time-domain equalization, which exhibits the smallest loss due to the non-linear distortion, and whose performance can be further improved by using advanced equalization schemes. Results also confirm that performance gets severely degraded when the link length exceeds 90-100 meters and the transmit power falls below 0 dBW.Comment: accepted for publication on IEEE Transactions on Communication

Hybrid beamforming for single carrier mmWave MIMO systems

Hybrid analog and digital beamforming (HBF) has been recognized as an attractive technique offering a tradeoff between hardware implementation limitation and system performance for future broadband millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. In contrast to most current works focusing on the HBF design for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based mmWave systems, this paper investigates the HBF design for single carrier (SC) systems due to the advantage of low peak-to-average power ratio in transmissions. By applying the alternating minimization method, we propose an efficient HBF scheme based on the minimum mean square error criterion. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional HBF scheme for SC systems.Comment: IEEE GlobalSIP2018, Feb. 201