User-Directed Analog Beamforming for Multiuser Millimeter-Wave Hybrid Array Systems

Abstract

Beamforming design for millimeter-Wave hybrid array with the subarray structure is very challenging. There is neither known optimal solution that maximizes the sum rate capacity nor near-optimal solution. This paper proposes some low-complexity user-directed analog radio- frequency (RF) beamforming design schemes. The basic idea is to iteratively allocate different subarrays to different users such that users' channel correlation can be efficiently reduced via RF beamforming. Several new but less efficient schemes are also presented to shed light on RF beamforming design, and to serve as comparisons for the user-directed schemes. Simulation results are provided for these proposed schemes, existing ones in the literature and an upper-bound for hybird array with a fully-connected structure. The user-directed schemes demonstrate significantly better sum-rate and BER performance over other schemes, although the gap to the upperbound is still large.