Hybrid Beamforming with One-Bit Quantized Phase Shifters in mmWave MIMO Systems

Economical and energy-efficient analog/digital hybrid beamforming has been widely considered as a promising approach for millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. While most hybrid beamforming techniques consider a fully-connected structure with a large number of phase shifters (PSs), the partially-connected structure has drawn more attention recently since it requires much less PSs and can further improve energy-efficiency. However, the impractical assumption of infinite or high resolution of PSs in existing solutions frustrates the real-world deployment of hybrid beamforming designs, and low- resolution PSs are typically adopted to reduce the hardware complexity and power consumption. In an effort to achieve maximum hardware efficiency, this paper focuses on the partially-connected architecture with one-bit (binary) PSs and considers the problem of joint hybrid precoder and combiner design for such mmWave MIMO systems. We propose to successively design the analog beamformers associated with each pair of sub- array, aiming at conditionally maximizing the spectral efficiency. A novel binary analog precoder and combiner optimization algorithm is proposed under a rank-1 approximation of the interference-included equivalent channel with polynomial complexity in the number of antennas. Then, the digital precoder and combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband channel to further enhance the spectral efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate the advantages of proposed hardware-efficiency hybrid precoder and combiner design.