Beam-Slicing for Jammer Mitigation in mmWave Massive MU-MIMO

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology promises unprecedentedly high data rates for next-generation wireless systems. To be practically viable, mmWave massive MU-MIMO basestations (BS) must (i) rely on low-resolution data-conversion and (ii) be robust to jammer interference. This paper considers the problem of mitigating the impact of a permanently transmitting jammer during uplink transmission to a BS equipped with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To this end, we propose SNIPS, short for Soft-Nulling of Interferers with Partitions in Space. SNIPS combines beam-slicing—a localized, analog spatial transform that focuses the jammer energy onto a subset of all ADCs—together with a soft-nulling data detector that exploits knowledge of which ADCs are contaminated by jammer interference. Our numerical results show that SNIPS is able to successfully serve 65% of the user equipments (UEs) for scenarios in which a conventional antenna-domain soft-nulling data detector is only able to serve 2% of the UEs.