A Kalman Based Hybrid Precoding for Multi-User Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems

Millimeter-wave communication in the 60-GHz band requires large antenna arrays at both the transmit and receive terminals to achieve beamforming gains, in order to counteract the high pathloss. Fully digital techniques are infeasible with large antenna arrays due to hardware constraints at such frequencies, while purely analog solutions suffer severe performance limitations. Hybrid analog/digital beamforming is a promising solution, especially, when extended to a multi-user scenario. This paper conveys three main contributions: 1) a Kalman-based formulation for hybrid analog/digital precoding in multi-user environment is proposed; 2) an analytical expression of the error between the transmitted and estimated data is formulated, so that the Kalman algorithm at the base station does not require information on the estimated data at the mobile stations, and instead, relies only on the precoding/combining matrix; and 3) an iterative solution is designed for the hybrid precoding scheme with affordable complexity. Simulation results confirm significant improvement of the proposed approach in terms of both bit error rate and spectral efficiency-achieving almost 7 b/s/Hz, at 20 dB with 10 channel paths with respect to the analog-only beamsteering, and almost 1 b/s/Hz with respect to the hybrid minimum mean square error precoding under the same conditions.