Hybrid Precoding for WideBand Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems in the Face of Beam Squint

Hybrid Transmit Precoding (TPC) is one of the most compelling solutions for millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems. However, most attention has been focused on narrow-band scenarios. Hence, we dedicate our efforts to the design of hybrid TPC for wideband mmWave MIMO systems, where the beam squint dramatically affects the system performance. We firstly show that the channel matrices of the different subcarriers possess distinct subspaces in case of high bandwidths, hence traditional hybrid TPC schemes suffer from an eroded performance. Therefore, we propose novel hybrid TPC schemes exploiting the full channel state information (CSI), which project all frequencies to the central frequency and construct the common analog TPC matrix for all subcarriers. Moreover, we propose several low-complexity array-vector based hybrid TPC schemes. The high-complexity manifold optimization based hybrid TPC method and the fully digital TPC operating with and without considering beam squint are provided as benchmarks. Our extensive numerical simulations show that the proposed hybrid TPC schemes are capable of achieving similar performance to the excessive-complexity fully digital TPC, when the bandwidth tends to 0.5 GHz and always outperform the traditional hybrid TPC schemes.

Automated summary

Hybrid Transmit Precoding (TPC) for wideband mmWave MIMO systems is designed to address the performance degradation caused by beam squint. Traditional hybrid TPC schemes are found to suffer from eroded performance due to distinct subspaces of channel matrices in high bandwidth scenarios. Novel hybrid TPC schemes utilizing full CSI and low-complexity array-vector based approaches are proposed, showing similar performance to fully digital TPC with less complexity.