Hybrid beamforming with finite-resolution phase shifters for large-scale MIMO systems

Abstract

In large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, high cost and high power consumption of RF chains typically prohibit the use of traditional baseband beamforming which requires one distinct radio-frequency (RF) chain per antenna. One possible architecture to reduce the number of RF chains is hybrid beamforming in which the overall beamformer consists of a concatenation of an analog RF beamformer implemented using phase shifters (PSs) and a low-dimensional baseband digital beamformer. However, conventional hybrid beamforming designs require high-resolution PSs, which are expensive. In this paper, we consider transceiver design for maximizing the spectral efficiency of a large-scale MIMO system with hybrid beamforming architecture where only finite-resolution PSs are available at both ends. We propose a heuristic transceiver design for the critical case where the number of RF chains is equal to the number of data streams. We show that the proposed hybrid beamforming design can achieve a rate close to that of optimal exhaustive search. We also suggest how to generalize the algorithm for the setting where the number of RF chains exceeds the number of data streams. We show that the generalized algorithm can use the extra RF chains to significantly improve the system performance in the case of low-resolution PSs.