Hybrid Beamforming Design and Performance with Imperfect Phase Shifters in Multiuser Millimeter Wave Systems

Abstract: Hybrid beamforming (HBF) includes analog beamforming with phase shifted array in RF domain and digital beamforming in baseband domain. Phase shifted array is usually made up with a large amount of phase shifters. Limited to the manufacturing techniques, phase shifters are unavoidable to have phaseshifting error and gain error. In the paper we study the influence of imperfect phase shifters upon the performance of multiuser mmWave massive MIMO systems1 with the wireless channel modeled by Rice fading. We derive the upper bound of the achievable sum rate with imperfect phase shifters, which can be very tight when the number of the antennas at the base station is much larger than the number of users. Results show that there is a performance ceiling due to phase-shifting error and gain error. Then we propose a novel channel estimation and hybrid beamforming method to settle this problem with low training overhead. It performs well when the channel paths are few and the channel Rician K-factor is large, which can be easily satisfied in outdoor mmWave communication environment. We further make a tradeoff between the performance and the training overhead so that the algorithm can work well in more kinds of propagation environment.