Dynamic Subarrays for Hybrid Precoding in Wideband mmWave MIMO Systems

TLDR

Hybrid analog/digital precoding balances spectral efficiency and power consumption, making it attractive for wideband millimeter‑wave MIMO systems that use large antenna arrays, yet prior work has focused on narrowband, fully connected architectures. This work develops a closed‑form solution for fully connected OFDM‑based hybrid precoding in frequency‑selective mmWave channels. The solution is extended to partially connected fixed architectures and a novel dynamic subarray construction based on long‑term channel statistics is introduced. Simulations show the proposed hybrid precoding achieves spectral efficiencies close to fully digital systems and that the dynamic subarray outperforms fixed subarray structures across various conditions.

Abstract

Hybrid analog/digital precoding architectures can address the tradeoff between achievable spectral efficiency and power consumption in large-scale MIMO systems. This makes them a promising candidate for millimeter wave systems, which deploy large antenna arrays at both the transmitter and the receiver to guarantee sufficient received signal power. Most prior work on hybrid precoding focused on narrowband channels and assumed fully connected hybrid architectures. Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, though, are expected to be wideband with frequency selectivity. In this paper, a closed-form solution for fully connected OFDM-based hybrid analog/digital precoding is developed for frequency selective mmWave systems. This solution is then extended to partially connected but fixed architectures in which each RF chain is connected to a specific subset of the antennas. The derived solutions give insights into how the hybrid subarray structures should be designed. Based on this, a novel technique that dynamically constructs the hybrid subarrays knowing the long-term channel characteristics is developed. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid precoding solutions achieve spectral efficiencies close to that obtained with fully digital architectures in wideband mmWave channels. Furthermore, the results indicate that the developed dynamic subarray solution outperforms the fixed hybrid subarray structures in various system and channel conditions.