Multiuser Beamforming for Partially-Connected Millimeter Wave Massive MIMO

Abstract: Multiuser beamforming is considered for partially-connected millimeter wave massive MIMO systems. Based on perfect channel state information (CSI), a low-complexity hybrid beamforming scheme that decouples the analog beamformer and the digital beamformer is proposed to maximize the sum-rate. The analog beamformer design is modeled as a phase alignment problem to harvest the array gain. Given the analog beamformer, the digital beamformer is designed by solving a weighted minimum mean squared error problem. Then based on imperfect CSI, an analog-only beamformer design scheme is proposed, where the design problem aims at maximizing the desired signal power on the current user and minimizing the power on the other users to mitigate the multiuser interference. The original problem is then transformed into a series of independent beam nulling subproblems, where an efficient iterative algorithm using the majorization-minimization framework is proposed to solve the subproblems. Simulation results show that, under perfect CSI, the proposed scheme achieves almost the same sum-rate performance as the existing schemes but with lower computational complexity; and under imperfect CSI, the proposed analog-only beamforming design scheme can effectively mitigate the multiuser interference.