Machine Learning Inspired Energy-Efficient Hybrid Precoding for MmWave Massive MIMO Systems

Hybrid precoding is a promising technique for mmWave massive MIMO systems, as it can considerably reduce the number of required radio-frequency (RF) chains without obvious performance loss. However, most of the existing hybrid precoding schemes require a complicated phase shifter network, which still involves high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient hybrid precoding architecture, where the analog part is realized by a small number of switches and inverters instead of a large number of high-resolution phase shifters. Our analysis proves that the performance gap between the proposed hybrid precoding architecture and the traditional one is small and keeps constant when the number of antennas goes to infinity. Then, inspired by the cross-entropy (CE) optimization developed in machine learning, we propose an adaptive CE (ACE)-based hybrid precoding scheme for this new architecture. It aims to adaptively update the probability distributions of the elements in hybrid precoder by minimizing the CE, which can generate a solution close to the optimal one with a sufficiently high probability. Simulation results verify that our scheme can achieve the near-optimal sum-rate performance and much higher energy efficiency than traditional schemes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE ICC 2017. The simulation codes are provided to reproduce the results in this paper at: http://oa.ee.tsinghua.edu.cn/dailinglong/publications/publications.htm

Energy efficiency of mmWave massive MIMO precoding with low-resolution DACs

With the congestion of the sub-6 GHz spectrum, the interest in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems operating on millimeter wave spectrum grows. In order to reduce the power consumption of such massive MIMO systems, hybrid analog/digital transceivers and application of low-resolution digital-to-analog/analog-to-digital converters have been recently proposed. In this work, we investigate the energy efficiency of quantized hybrid transmitters equipped with a fully/partially-connected phase-shifting network composed of active/passive phase-shifters and compare it to that of quantized digital precoders. We introduce a quantized single-user MIMO system model based on an additive quantization noise approximation considering realistic power consumption and loss models to evaluate the spectral and energy efficiencies of the transmit precoding methods. Simulation results show that partially-connected hybrid precoders can be more energy-efficient compared to digital precoders, while fully-connected hybrid precoders exhibit poor energy efficiency in general. Also, the topology of phase-shifting components offers an energy-spectral efficiency trade-off: active phase-shifters provide higher data rates, while passive phase-shifters maintain better energy efficiency.Comment: Published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processin

Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Precoder Design for Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs/DACs

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and design of a hybrid precoding system tailored for mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems in both downlink and uplink scenarios. The proposed system employs a two-stage precoding approach, incorporating UQ and NUQ techniques, along with low-resolution DACs in downlink and ADCs in uplink to address hardware limitations. The system considers Zero Forcing and Minimum Mean Square Error algorithms as digital precoding methods for the uplink scenario, while exploring the impact of different DAC resolutions on system performance. Extensive simulations reveal that the proposed system surpasses conventional analog beamforming methods, particularly in multi-user scenarios involving inter-user interference. In downlink, the system demonstrates a trade-off between SE and EE, achieving higher Energy Efficiency with NUQ. In uplink, NUQ and UQ converters exhibit similar performance trends regardless of the chosen combiner algorithm. The proposed system attains enhanced Spectral and Energy Efficiency while maintaining reduced complexity and overhead. The study significantly contributes to the advancement of efficient and effective mmWave multi-user massive MIMO systems by providing a thorough analysis of various quantization schemes and precoding techniques. The findings of this research are expected to aid in the optimization of 5G and beyond technologies, particularly in high-density deployment scenarios