Dynamic Hybrid Beamforming With Low-Resolution PSs for Wideband mmWave MIMO-OFDM Systems

Abstract

Analog/digital hybrid beamforming is considered as a key enabling multiple antenna technology for implementing millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications since it can reduce the number of costly and power-hungry radio frequency (RF) chains while still providing for spatial multiplexing. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid beamforming architecture with dynamic antenna subarrays and hardware-efficient low-resolution phase shifters (PSs) for a wideband mmWave MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system. By dynamically connecting each RF chain to a non-overlapping antenna subarray via a switch network and PSs, multiple-antenna diversity can be exploited to mitigate the performance loss due to the employment of practical low-resolution PSs. For this dynamic hybrid beamforming architecture, we jointly design the hybrid precoder and combiner to maximize the average spectral efficiency of the mmWave MIMO-OFDM system. In particular, the spectral efficiency maximization problem is first converted to a mean square error (MSE) minimization problem. Then, an efficient iterative hybrid beamformer algorithm is developed based on classical block coordination descent (BCD) methods. An analysis of the convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm is also provided. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed hybrid beamforming algorithm with dynamic subarrays and low-resolution PSs.