Path based MIMO channel model for hybrid beamforming architecture analysis

Abstract

Hybrid beamforming communication systems allow the reduction of digital channels by employing an analogue beamforming network. This approach offers a large reduction in computational effort and energy consumption. Still there are only few practical realizations of such hybrid beamforming communication systems. Hence, there is a nearly infinite number of possible implementations of such an architecture. To analyze and compare the performance of different hybrid beamforming architectures, we present a path based multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channel model. This tool allows us to generate arbitrary propagation paths with distributions of direction of departure (DOD), direction of arrival (DOA) as well as phase and amplitudes. Therefore, an insight of the channel capacity and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be given for different kinds of hybrid beamforming architectures. The results show that the newly developed path based channel model is beneficial for the analysis of hybrid beamforming architectures.