Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Downlink Per-Group Communications With Hybrid Linear Precoding

Abstract

We address the problem of analyzing and classifying into groups the downlink channel environment in a dense millimeter-wavelength cell, accounting for path loss, multipath fading, and User Equipment (UE) blocking, by employing a hybrid propagation and multipath fading model, thus using accurate inter-group interference modeling. The base station (BS) employs a large Uniform Planar Array (UPA) to facilitate massive Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) communications with high efficiency. UEs are equipped with a single antenna and are distributed uniformly within the cell. The key problem is analyzing and defining groups toward efficient precoding. Because balanced throughput is desired between groups, up to four separate frequency sub-carriers are employed in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) system. We show that by employing three or four OFDMA subcarriers, depending on the number of UEs in the cell and the cell range, the UEs can be efficiently separated into <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">high-throughput</i> groups, with each group employing Virtual Channel Model Beams (VCMB) based inner precoding, followed by efficient Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) outer precoders. For each group, we study two different sub-grouping methods offering different advantages. We show that the improvement offered by Zero-Forcing Per-Group Precoding (ZF-PGP) over Matched Filter Precoding (MFP) and Zero-Forcing Precoding (ZFP) is very high when finite-alphabet inputs are used. We also show ZF-PGP with finite-alphabet inputs significantly outperforms MFP with Gaussian inputs in certain realistic setups. Finally, a new technique for power allocation among different UEs is proposed, called Optimized Per-Group Power Allocation (OPGPA), which achieves much higher power efficiency jointly with equal throughput among all UEs in each group.