Massive MIMO Hybrid Precoding for LEO Satellite Communications With Twin-Resolution Phase Shifters and Nonlinear Power Amplifiers

Abstract: The massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technology has recently attracted much attention in the non-geostationary, e.g., low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) systems since it can significantly improve the energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency. In this work, we develop a hybrid analog/digital precoding technique in the massive MIMO LEO SATCOM downlink, which reduces the onboard hardware complexity and power consumption. In the proposed scheme, the analog precoder is implemented via a more practical twin-resolution phase shifting (TRPS) network to make a meticulous tradeoff between the power consumption and array gain. In addition, we consider and study the impact of the distortion effect of the nonlinear power amplifiers (NPAs) in the system design. By jointly considering all the above factors, we propose an efficient algorithmic approach for the TRPS-based hybrid precoding problem with NPAs. Numerical results show the EE gains considering the nonlinear distortion and the performance superiority of the proposed TRPS-based hybrid precoding scheme over the baselines.