Virtual Sectorization to Enable Hybrid Beamforming in mm-Wave mMIMO

Abstract

Hybrid beamforming (HBF) is a key technology to enable mm-wave Massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) receivers for future-generation wireless communications. It combines beamforming in both analog (via phase shifters) and digital domains, resulting in low power consumption and high spectral efficiency. In practice, the problem of joint beamforming in multi-user scenarios is still open because an analog beam can't cover all users simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical approach to divide users into clusters. Each cluster consists of users inside a virtual sector produced by the analog beamforming of an HBF-based mMIMO receiver. Thus, inside each sector, a lower-cost digital beamforming serves a limited number of users within the same cluster. Simulations with realistic non-line-of-sight scenarios generated by the QuaDRiGa 2.0 demonstrate that our methods outperform standard FFT-based alternatives and almost achieve SVD-based beamspace performance bound.