Hybrid Beamforming for Multi-User Massive MIMO Systems

The large scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with hybrid beamforming (HBF) is a promising communications technology due to its excellent tradeoff between hardware complexity and system performance. Assuming perfect channel state information is acquired, we consider a single cell downlink multi-user massive MIMO system working in a generic channel model with a hybrid structure that supports multiple streams per UE. We aim to find an analog and digital precoder/combiner that maximizes the sum-rate of the communication system. Unlike the traditional two-stage design criterion, which separately designs the analog and digital stages, our proposed criterion jointly designs two stages by trying to avoid the loss of information at each stage. When double the least number of radio frequency (RF) chains are available, we provide an asymptotically optimal solution in a massive MIMO regimen, i.e., the sum-rate of such an HBF solution could approach the channel capacity under large base station (BS) antenna arrays. A corresponding solution using the fewest RF chains is then derived. Finally, the simulation results are shown to validate the proposed schemes. Specifically, the solution with the fewest RF chains is shown to outperform the state of the art for HBF systems, even when the number of BS antennas is not very large. It should be noted that the schemes proposed in this paper have low complexity owing to their closed-form solutions.