Hardware-Constrained Millimeter Wave Systems for 5G: Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions

Abstract

Although millimeter wave (mmWave) systems promise to offer larger bandwidth and unprecedented peak data rates, their practical implementation faces several hardware challenges compared to sub-6 GHz communication systems. These hardware constraints can seriously undermine the performance and deployment progress of mmWave systems and, thus, necessitate disruptive solutions in the cross-design of analog and digital modules. In this article, we discuss the importance of different hardware constraints and propose a novel system architecture, which is able to release these hardware constraints while achieving better performance for future millimeter wave communication systems. The characteristics of the proposed architecture are articulated in detail, and a representative example is provided to demonstrate its validity and efficacy.

arXiv comment11 pages, 4 figures, to appear in IEEE Communications Magazine

References in corpus (6)

• An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems
• Channel Estimation and Hybrid Precoding for Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems
• Massive MIMO with Non-Ideal Arbitrary Arrays: Hardware Scaling Laws and Circuit-Aware Design
• Small-Scale, Local Area, and Transitional Millimeter Wave Propagation for 5G Communications
• Bayesian Optimal Data Detector for Hybrid mmWave MIMO-OFDM Systems with Low-Resolution ADCs
• A Low-Resolution ADC Module Assisted Hybrid Beamforming Architecture for mmWave Communications