Multi-beam transmission diversity with hybrid beamforming for MIMO-OFDM systems

Abstract

The ever-increasing traffic crunch for the wireless communication has drawn attention to the large spectrum available in the millimeter-wave bands as a potential means to achieve several fold mobile data traffic increase. While the channel characteristics at the millimeter-wave bands are known to be unfavorable for the mobile wireless communication purpose, the high gain available from massive array antenna facilitated by the short wavelength makes it possible to overcome the large path-loss. In this paper, we propose a hybrid beamforming architecture that combines an analog beamforming with array antennas and a digital precoding with multiple RF chains. Furthermore, we propose a multi-beam transmission diversity scheme for single stream transmission for single user MIMO operation. It is shown through various simulation results that the proposed hybrid beamforming scheme leads to considerable performance improvements even with limited feedback.