paper

Are mmWave Low-Complexity Beamforming Structures Energy-Efficient? Analysis of the Downlink MU-MIMO

arXiv:1610.07240

Abstract

Future cellular systems based on the use of above-6 GHz frequencies, the so-called millimeter wave (mmWave) bandwidths, will heavily rely on the use of antenna arrays both at the transmitter and at the receiver, possibly with a large number of elements. For complexity reasons, fully digital precoding and postcoding structures may turn out to be unfeasible, and thus suboptimal structures, making use of simplified hardware and a limited number of RF chains, have been investigated. This paper considers and makes a comparative assessment, both from a spectral efficiency and energy efficiency point of view, of several suboptimal precoding and postcoding beamforming structures for the downlink of a cellular multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) system. Based on the most recently available data for the energy consumption of phase shifters and switches, we show that there are cases where fully-digital beamformers may achieve a larger energy efficiency than lower-complexity solutions, as well as that structures based on the exclusive use of switches achieve quite unsatisfactory performance in realistic scenarios.

arXiv comment6 pages. To be presented at the 2016 GLOBECOM Workshop on Emerging Technologies for 5G Wireless Cellular Networks (ET5G). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1607.07234

References in corpus (4)