UC Irvine

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications have been considered as a key technology for next-generation cellular systems and Wi-Fi networks because of its advances in providing orders-of-magnitude wider bandwidth than current wireless networks. Economical and energy-efficient analog/digital hybrid precoding and combining transceivers have been often proposed for mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to overcome the severe propagation loss of mmWave channels. One major shortcoming of existing solutions lies in the assumption of infinite or high-resolution phase shifters (PSs) to realize the analog beamformers. However, low-resolution PSs are typically adopted in practice to reduce the hardware cost and power consumption. Motivated by this fact, in this paper, we investigate the practical design of hybrid precoders and combiners with low-resolution PSs in mmWave MIMO systems. In particular, we propose an iterative algorithm which successively designs the low-resolution analog precoder and combiner pair, aiming at conditionally maximizing the spectral efficiency. Then, the digital precoder and combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband channel to further enhance the spectral efficiency. In an effort to achieve an even more hardware-efficient large antenna array, we also investigate the design of hybrid beamformers with one-bit resolution (binary) PSs, and present a novel binary analog precoder and combiner optimization algorithm. After analyzing the computational complexity, the proposed low-resolution hybrid beamforming design is further extended to multiuser MIMO communication systems. Simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed algorithms compared to existing low-resolution hybrid beamforming designs, particularly for the one-bit resolution PSs scenario.