Partially-Connected Hybrid Precoding in mm-Wave Systems With Dynamic Phase Shifter Networks

Abstract: Hybrid precoding is a cost-effective approach to support directional transmissions for millimeter wave (mm-wave) communications, and its design challenge mainly lies in the analog component which consists of a network of phase shifters. The partially-connected structure employs a small number of phase shifters and therefore serves as an energy efficient solution for hybrid precoding. In this paper, we propose a double phase shifter (DPS) implementation for the phase shifter network in the partially-connected structure, which allows more tractable and flexible hybrid precoder design. In particular, the hybrid precoder design is identified as an eigenvalue problem. To further enhance the performance, dynamic mapping from radio frequency (RF) chains to antennas is proposed, for which a greedy algorithm and a modified K-means algorithm are developed. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed hybrid precoding algorithms with the DPS implementation over existing ones. Given its low hardware complexity and high spectral efficiency, the proposed structure is a promising candidate for 5G mm-wave systems.