On the Performance of Beam Allocation Based Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems

Moving to millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies and deploying massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna arrays have shown great potential of supporting high-data-rate communications in the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond wireless networks, thanks to the availability of huge amounts of mmWave frequency bandwidth and massive numbers of narrow and high gain beams. A number of massive MIMO beamforming techniques have been proposed, among which the fixed-beam scheme has attracted considerable interests from both academia and industry due to its simplicity and requirement of a small number of radio frequency (RF) chains compared to the number of base-station (BS) antennas. Moreover, a beam allocation based pure analog fixed-beam system requires much lower complexity and less signalling overhead than the hybrid beamforming based fixed-beam system, which can therefore be easily implemented in the practical systems. In this paper, the sum data rate of beam allocation based multi-user massive MIMO systems is studied where a near-optimal low complexity beam allocation algorithm is adopted. Simulation results show that our derived average sum data rate serves as a good approximation of the simulation results.