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

Low-Complexity Hybrid Beamforming for Massive MIMO Systems in Frequency-Selective Channels

Hybrid beamforming for frequency-selective channels is a challenging problem as the phase shifters provide the same phase shift to all of the subcarriers. The existing approaches solely rely on the channel's frequency response and the hybrid beamformers maximize the average spectral efficiency over the whole frequency band. Compared to state-of-the-art, we show that substantial sum-rate gains can be achieved, both for rich and sparse scattering channels, by jointly exploiting the frequency and time domain characteristics of the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. In our proposed approach, the radio frequency (RF) beamformer coherently combines the received symbols in the time domain and, thus, it concentrates signal's power on a specific time sample. As a result, the RF beamformer flattens the frequency response of the "effective" transmission channel and reduces its root mean square delay spread. Then, a baseband combiner mitigates the residual interference in the frequency domain. We present the closed-form expressions of the proposed beamformer and its performance by leveraging the favorable propagation condition of massive MIMO channels and we prove that our proposed scheme can achieve the performance of fully-digital zero-forcing when number of employed phase shifter networks is twice the resolvable multipath components in the time domain.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Acces

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

On the Number of RF Chains and Phase Shifters, and Scheduling Design with Hybrid Analog-Digital Beamforming

This paper considers hybrid beamforming (HB) for downlink multiuser massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with frequency selective channels. For this system, first we determine the required number of radio frequency (RF) chains and phase shifters (PSs) such that the proposed HB achieves the same performance as that of the digital beamforming (DB) which utilizes $N$ (number of transmitter antennas) RF chains. We show that the performance of the DB can be achieved with our HB just by utilizing $r_t$ RF chains and $2r_t(N-r_t + 1)$ PSs, where $r_t \leq N$ is the rank of the combined digital precoder matrices of all sub-carriers. Second, we provide a simple and novel approach to reduce the number of PSs with only a negligible performance degradation. Numerical results reveal that only $20-40$ PSs per RF chain are sufficient for practically relevant parameter settings. Finally, for the scenario where the deployed number of RF chains $(N_a)$ is less than $r_t$, we propose a simple user scheduling algorithm to select the best set of users in each sub-carrier. Simulation results validate theoretical expressions, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HB design over the existing HB designs in both flat fading and frequency selective channels.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (Minor Revision

Hybrid Beamforming for Large Antenna Arrays with Phase Shifter Selection

This paper proposes an asymptotically optimal hybrid beamforming solution for large antenna arrays by exploiting the properties of the singular vectors of the channel matrix. It is shown that the elements of the channel matrix with Rayleigh fading follow a normal distribution when large antenna arrays are employed. The proposed beamforming algorithm is effective in both sparse and rich propagation environments, and is applicable for both point-to-point and multiuser scenarios. In addition, a closed-form expression and a lower-bound for the achievable rates are derived when analog and digital phase shifters are employed. It is shown that the performance of the hybrid beamformers using phase shifters with more than 2-bits resolution is comparable with analog phase shifting. A novel phase shifter selection scheme that reduces the power consumption at the phase shifter network is proposed when the wireless channel is modeled by Rayleigh fading. Using this selection scheme, the spectral efficiency can be increased as the power consumption in the phase shifter network reduces. Compared to the scenario that all of the phase shifters are in operation, the simulation results indicate that the spectral efficiency increases when up to 50% of phase shifters are turned off.Comment: Accepted to Transactions on Wireless Communications, 201