Multiplexing Analysis of Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract: This paper is concerned with spatial multiplexing analysis for millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems. For a single-user mmWave system employing distributed antenna subarray architecture in which the transmitter and receiver consist of Kt and Kr subarrays, respectively, an asymptotic multiplexing gain formula is firstly derived when the numbers of antennas at subarrays go to infinity. Specifically, assuming that all subchannels have the same average number of propagation paths L, the formula implies that by employing such a distributed antenna-subarray architecture, an exact average maximum multiplexing gain of KrKtL can be achieved. This result means that compared to the co-located antenna architecture, using the distributed antenna-subarray architecture can scale up the maximum multiplexing gain proportionally to KrKt. In order to further reveal the relation between diversity gain and multiplexing gain, a simple characterization of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff is also given. The multiplexing gain analysis is then extended to the multiuser scenario. Moreover, simulation results obtained with the hybrid analog/digital processing corroborate the analysis results.