Hybrid Beamforming for Broadband Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO Systems

MmWave systems with most prior work focused on its narrowband hybrid analog/digital precoding, however, will likely operate on wideband channels with frequency selectivity. Therefore, in this paper we investigate wideband angular beamforming schemes for mmWave massive MIMO-OFDM systems. First, for the RF analog beamforming, the optimal beamforming of an unconstrained antenna array (UAA) is given as the performance benchmark. Then, the optimal angular beamforming (OAB) and a simple dominant angular beamforming (DAB) of a shared antenna array (SAA) are compared in received SNR and implementation cost. Second, for the baseband digital precoding, the space-frequency vector perturbation (SFVP) precoding is proposed to collect both spatial and multi-path diversity. Finally, analytical and simulation results show that: a) DAB is a cost-effective RF beamforming scheme under LOS channel environment; b) the proposed hybrid DAB-SFVP beamforming scheme achieves the array gain equaling the number of transmit antennas N-t and diversity gain equaling the product of the number of RF chains K and the number of temporal resolvable clusters L.