Phase Shifters Versus Switches: An Energy Efficiency Perspective on Hybrid Beamforming

Hybrid beamforming architectures provide promising solutions to harness the benefits of massive multi-input multi-output systems by incorporating phase shifters, switches, or their combinations. This letter addresses the design of such architectures from an energy efficiency (EE) perspective. We provide closed-form expressions to compare several promising hybrid beamforming architectures, and also derive optimal numbers of antennas required for maximizing the EE. Our results indicate that the asymptotic closed-forms provide a good approximation even for a relatively small number of antennas. Moreover, the combination of phase shifters and switches offers significantly higher EE versus conventional phase shifter-only architectures, while nearly preserving spectral efficiency.