Hierarchical Codebook Design for Beamforming Training in Millimeter-Wave Communication

In millimeter-wave communication, large antenna arrays are required to achieve high power gain by steering toward each other with narrow beams, which poses the problem to efficiently search the best beam direction in the angle domain at both Tx and Rx sides. As the exhaustive search is time consuming, hierarchical search has been widely accepted to reduce the complexity, and its performance is highly dependent on the codebook design. In this paper, we propose two basic criteria for the hierarchical codebook design, and devise an efficient hierarchical codebook by jointly exploiting sub-array and deactivation (turning-off) antenna processing techniques, where closed-form expressions are provided to generate the codebook. Performance evaluations are conducted under different system and channel models. Results show superiority of the proposed codebook over the existing alternatives.