Low Complexity Hybrid Precoding and Channel Estimation Based on Hierarchical Multi Beam Search for Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems
In millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO systems, while a hybrid digital/analog precoding structure offers the potential to increase the achievable rate, it also faces the challenge of the need of a low complexity design. In specific, the hybrid precoding may require matrix operations with a scale of antenna size, which is generally large in mmWave communication. Moreover, the channel estimation is also rather time consuming due to the large number of antennas at both Tx/Rx sides. In this paper, a low complexity hybrid precoding and channel estimation approach is proposed. In the channel estimation phase, a hierarchical multi beam search scheme is proposed to fast acquire $N_{\rm{S} (the number of streams) multipath components (MPCs)/clusters with the highest powers. In the hybrid precoding phase, the analog and digital precodings are decoupled. The analog precoding is designed to steer along the $N_{\rm{S} acquired MPCs/clusters at both Tx/Rx sides, shaping an equivalent $N_{\rm{S}\times N_{\rm{S} baseband channel, while the digital precoding performs operations in the baseband with the reduced scale channel. Performance evaluations show that, compared with a state of the art scheme, while achieving a close or even better performance when the number of radio frequency (RF) chains or streams is small, both the computational complexity of the hybrid precoding and the time complexity of the channel estimation are greatly reduced.
ArXiv