Distributed Hybrid Precoding for Indoor Deployments Using Millimeter Wave Band

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) are an alternative of network deployment that allows reducing the distance between transmitter and receiver by distributing the antennas throughout the coverage area. Moreover, the performance of the millimeter wave (mmWave) band can be significantly high within short transmitter-receiver distances. In this paper, the potential benefits of DAS deployments in the mmWave band are studied. To this aim, a distributed hybrid precoding (DHP) solution with remote antenna unit (RAU) selection capabilities is proposed and analyzed in an indoor DAS working in mmWaves and compared to two other indoor deployment strategies: a conventional cellular system with colocated antenna arrays and a small cell deployment. The results show that, using DHP, DAS not only brings huge gains to cell-edge users rate but also increases system capacity, becoming the best overall deployment. Further simulations including practical limitations have revealed that DAS using DHP is quite robust to combiner losses, although its performance is significantly degraded by outdated channel reports.