Two-Step Codeword Design for Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems With Quantized Phase Shifters

Abstract

In this paper, a two-step codeword design approach for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems is presented. Ideal codewords are first designed, which ignores the hardware constraints in terms of phase shifter resolution and the number of RF chains. Based on the ideal codewords, practical codewords are then obtained taking the hardware constraints into consideration. For the ideal codeword design in the first step, additional phase is introduced to the beam gain to provide extra degree of freedom. We develop a phase-shifted ideal codeword design (PS-ICD) method, which is based on alternative minimization with each iteration having a closed-form solution and can be extended to design more general beamforming vectors with different beam patterns. Once the ideal codewords are obtained in the first step, the practical codeword design problem in the second step is to approach the ideal codewords by considering the hardware constraints of the hybrid precoding structure in terms of phase shifter resolution and the number of RF chains. We propose a fast search based alternative minimization (FS-AltMin) algorithm that alternatively designs the analog precoder and digital precoder. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods and show that the codewords designed based on the two-step approach outperform those designed by the existing approaches.