In the past ten years, there have been tremendous research progresses on massive MIMO systems, most of which stand from the communications viewpoint. A new trend to investigate massive MIMO, especially for the sparse scenario like millimeter wave (mmWave) transmission, is to re-build the transceiver design from array signal processing viewpoint that could deeply exploit the half-wavelength array and provide enhanced performances in many aspects. For example, the high dimensional channel could be decomposed into small amount of physical parameters, e.g., angle of arrival (AoA), angle of departure (AoD), multi-path delay, Doppler shift, etc. As a consequence, transceiver techniques like synchronization, channel estimation, beamforming, precoding, multi-user access, etc., can be re-shaped with these physical parameters, as opposed to those designed directly with channel state information (CSI). Interestingly, parameters like AoA/AoD and multi-path delay are frequency insensitive and thus can be used to guide the downlink transmission from uplink training even for FDD systems. Moreover, some phenomena of massive MIMO that were vaguely revealed previously can be better explained now with array signal processing, e.g., the beam squint effect. In all, the target of this paper is to present an overview of recent progress on merging array signal processing into massive MIMO communications as well as its promising future directions.

An Overview of Enhanced Massive MIMO With Array Signal Processing Techniques

The combination of large bandwidth at terahertz (THz) and the large number of antennas in massive MIMO results in the non-negligible spatial wideband effect in time domain or the corresponding beam squint issue in frequency domain, which will cause severe performance degradation if not properly treated. In particular, for a phased array based hybrid transceiver, there exists a contradiction between the requirement of mitigating the beam squint issue and the hardware implementation of the analog beamformer/combiner, which makes the accurate beamforming an enormous challenge. In this paper, we propose two wideband hybrid beamforming approaches, based on the virtual sub-array and the true-time-delay (TTD) lines, respectively, to eliminate the impact of beam squint. The former one divides the whole array into several virtual sub-arrays to generate a wider beam and provides an evenly distributed array gain across the whole operating frequency band. To further enhance the beamforming performance and thoroughly address the aforementioned contradiction, the latter one introduces the TTD lines and propose a new hardware implementation of analog beamformer/combiner. This TTD-aided hybrid implementation enables the wideband beamforming and achieves the near-optimal performance close to full-digital transceivers. Analytical and numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of two proposed wideband beamforming approaches.

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Wideband Beamforming for Hybrid Massive MIMO Terahertz Communications

In this paper, we study the hybrid precoding structures over limited feedback channels for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We focus on the system performance of hybrid precoding under a more realistic hardware network model, particularly, with inevitable dissipation. The effect of quantized analog and digital precoding is characterized. We investigate the spectral efficiencies of two typical hybrid precoding structures, i.e., the sub-connected structure and the fully connected structure. It is revealed that increasing signal power can compensate for the performance loss incurred by quantized analog precoding. In addition, by capturing the nature of the effective channels for hybrid processing, we employ a channel correlation-based codebook and demonstrate that the codebook shows a great advantage over the conventional random vector quantization codebook. It is also discovered that, if the channel correlation-based codebook is utilized, the sub-connected structure always outperforms the fully connected structure in either massive MIMO or low signal-to-noise ratio scenarios; otherwise, the fully-connected structrue achieves better performance. Simulation results under both Rayleigh fading channels and millimeter wave (mm-wave) channels verify the conclusions above.

Hybrid Precoding Architecture for Massive Multiuser MIMO With Dissipation: Sub-Connected or Fully Connected Structures?

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.

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

Hybrid digital analog (HDA) beamforming has attracted considerable attention in practical implementation of millimeter wave (mmWave) multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems due to the low power consumption with respect to its fully digital baseband counterpart. The implementation cost, performance, and power efficiency of HDA beamforming depends on the level of connectivity and reconfigurability of the analog beamforming network. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two typical architectures that can be regarded as extreme cases, namely, the fully-connected (FC) and the one-stream-per-subarray (OSPS) architectures. In the FC architecture each RF antenna port is connected to all antenna elements of the array, while in the OSPS architecture the RF antenna ports are connected to disjoint subarrays. We jointly consider the initial beam acquisition and data communication phases, such that the latter takes place by using the beam direction information obtained by the former. We use the state-of-the-art beam alignment (BA) scheme previously proposed by the authors and consider a family of MU-MIMO precoding schemes well adapted to the beam information extracted from the BA phase. We also evaluate the power efficiency of the two HDA architectures taking into account the power dissipation at different hardware components as well as the power backoff under typical power amplifier constraints. Numerical results show that the two architectures achieve similar sum spectral efficiency, while the OSPS architecture is advantageous with respect to the FC case in terms of hardware complexity and power efficiency, at the sole cost of a slightly longer BA time-to-acquisition due to its reduced beam angle resolution.

Fully-/Partially-Connected Hybrid Beamforming Architectures for mmWave MU-MIMO

In this paper, we study the hybrid precoding structures over limited feedback channels for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We focus on the system performance of hybrid precoding under a more realistic hardware network model, particularly, with inevitable dissipation. The effect of quantized analog and digital precoding is characterized. We investigate the spectral efficiencies of two typical hybrid precoding structures, i.e., the sub-connected structure and the fully-connected structure. It is revealed that increasing signal power can compensate the performance loss incurred by quantized analog precoding. In addition, by capturing the nature of the effective channels for hybrid processing, we employ a channel correlation-based codebook and demonstrate that the codebook shows a great advantage over the conventional random vector quantization (RVQ) codebook. It is also discovered that, if the channel correlation-based codebook is utilized, the sub-connected structure always outperforms the fully-connected structure in either massive MIMO or low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios; otherwise, the fully-connected structrue achieves better performance. Simulation results under both Rayleigh fading channels and millimeter wave (mmWave) channels verify the conclusions above.

Hybrid Precoding Architecture for Massive Multiuser MIMO with Dissipation: Sub-Connected or Fully-Connected Structures?

In this letter, we consider hybrid beamforming for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted communications with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Using a hybrid beamforming design, we derive an approximate closed-form expression of rate and provide a power allocation design under the line-of-sight (LoS) channels. It is revealed that the total transmit power should be inversely proportional to the number of antennas of UAV in order to satisfy the rate requirement of each user. Furthermore, we propose the optimal location design of the UAV. For the special case the pathloss exponent is 2, the optimal location is the weighted average location of all users where the weights are signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) requirements of all users. It is shown that the weighted average location could be an approximate method to design the UAV location with little performance gap to the optimal location even when path loss exponent is not 2.

Energy-Saving UAV-Assisted Multiuser Communications With Massive MIMO Hybrid Beamforming

In this article, we consider hybrid beamforming designs for multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Aiming at maximizing the weighted spectral efficiency, we propose one alternating maximization framework where the analog precoding is optimized by Riemannian manifold optimization. If the digital precoding is optimized by a locally optimal algorithm, we obtain a locally optimal alternating maximization algorithm. In contrast, if we use a weighted minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based iterative algorithm for digital precoding, we obtain a suboptimal alternating maximization algorithm with reduced complexity in each iteration. By characterizing the upper bound of the weighted arithmetic and geometric means of mean square errors (MSEs), it is shown that the two alternating maximization algorithms have similar performance when the user specific weights do not have big differences. Verified by numerical results, the performance gap between the two alternating maximization algorithms becomes large when the ratio of the maximal and minimal weights among users is very large. Moreover, we also propose a low-complexity closed-form method without iterations. It employs matrix decomposition for the analog beamforming and weighted MMSE for the digital beamforming. Although it is not supposed to maximize the weighted spectral efficiency, it exhibits small performance deterioration compared to the two iterative alternating maximization algorithms and it qualifies as a good initialization for iterative algorithms, saving thereby iterations.

Weighted Spectral Efficiency Optimization for Hybrid Beamforming in Multiuser Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems

In this paper, we consider hybrid beamforming designs for multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Aiming at maximizing the weighted spectral efficiency, we propose one alternating maximization framework where the analog precoding is optimized by Riemannian manifold optimization. If the digital precoding is optimized by a locally optimal algorithm, we obtain a locally optimal alternating maximization algorithm. In contrast, if we use a weighted minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based iterative algorithm for digital precoding, we obtain a suboptimal alternating maximization algorithm with reduced complexity in each iteration. By characterizing the upper bound of the weighted arithmetic and geometric means of mean square errors (MSEs), it is shown that the two alternating maximization algorithms have similar performance when the user specific weights do not have big differences. Verified by numerical results, the performance gap between the two alternating maximization algorithms becomes large when the ratio of the maximal and minimal weights among users is very large. Moreover, we also propose a low-complexity closed-form method without iterations. It employs matrix decomposition for the analog beamforming and weighted MMSE for the digital beamforming. Although it is not supposed to maximize the weighted spectral efficiency, it exhibits small performance deterioration compared to the two iterative alternating maximization algorithms and it qualifies as a good initialization for iterative algorithms, saving thereby iterations.

Jingbo Du

Papers

Hybrid Precoding Architecture for Massive Multiuser MIMO With Dissipation: Sub-Connected or Fully Connected Structures?

Hybrid Precoding Architecture for Massive Multiuser MIMO with Dissipation: Sub-Connected or Fully-Connected Structures?

Energy-Saving UAV-Assisted Multiuser Communications With Massive MIMO Hybrid Beamforming

Weighted Spectral Efficiency Optimization for Hybrid Beamforming in Multiuser Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems

Weighted Spectral Efficiency Optimization for Hybrid Beamforming in Multiuser Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems