DOA-based beamforming for multi-cell massive MIMO systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a direction-of-arrival (DOA)-based beamforming approach for multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output systems with uniform rectangular arrays (URAs). The proposed approach utilizes the steering vectors of the URA to form a basis of the spatial space and selects the partial space for beamforming according to the DOA information. As a result, the proposed approach is of lower computational complexity than the existing methods which utilize the channel covariance matrices. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach can eliminate the interference in the limit of infinite number of the URA antennas. Since the proposed approach utilizes the multipaths to enhance the signal rather than discarding them, the proposed approach is of better performance than the existing low-complexity method, which is verified by the simulation results.