Common Codebook Millimeter Wave Beam Design: Designing Beams for Both Sounding and Communication with Uniform Planar Arrays

Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are expected to utilize wide bandwidths available at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies for enhancing system throughput. However, the unfavorable channel conditions of mmWave links, e.g., higher path loss and attenuation due to atmospheric gases or water vapor, hinder reliable communications. To compensate for these severe losses, it is essential to have a multitude of antennas to generate sharp and strong beams for directional transmission. In this paper, we consider mmWave systems using uniform planar array (UPA) antennas, which effectively place more antennas on a two-dimensional grid. A hybrid beamforming setup is also considered to generate beams by combining a multitude of antennas using only a few radio frequency chains. We focus on designing a set of transmit beamformers generating beams adapted to the directional characteristics of mmWave links assuming a UPA and hybrid beamforming. We first define ideal beam patterns for UPA structures. Each beamformer is constructed to minimize the mean squared error from the corresponding ideal beam pattern. Simulation results verify that the proposed codebooks enhance beamforming reliability and data rate in mmWave systems.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure

A quadratically convergent method for interference alignment in MIMO interference channels

Alternating minimization and steepest descent are commonly used strategies to obtain interference alignment (IA) solutions in the K-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel (IC). Although these algorithms are shown to converge monotonically, they experience a poor convergence rate, requiring an enormous amount of iterations which substantially increases with the size of the scenario. To alleviate this drawback, in this letter we resort to the Gauss-Newton (GN) method, which is well-known to experience quadratic convergence when the iterates are sufficiently close to the optimum. We discuss the convergence properties of the proposed GN algorithm and provide several numerical examples showing that it always converges to the optimum with quadratic rate, reducing dramatically the required computation time in comparison to other algorithms, hence paving a new way for the design of IA algorithms.The authors were supported by the Spanish Government (MICINN) under projects TEC2010-19545-C04-03 (COSIMA), CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 CSD2008-00010 (COMONSENS) and FPU grants AP2009-1105 and AP2010-2189