Beam Management for Millimeter-Wave Beamspace MU-MIMO Systems

Millimeter-wave (mm-wave) communication has attracted increasing attention as a promising technology for 5G networks. One of the key architectural features of mm-wave is the possibility of using large antenna arrays at both the transmitter and receiver sides. Therefore, by employing directional beamforming, both mm-wave base stations (MBSs) and mm-wave user equipments (MUEs) are capable of supporting multi-beam simultaneous transmissions. However, most of the existing research results have only considered a single beam. Thus, the potentials of mm-wave have not been fully exploited yet. In this context, in order to improve the performance of short-range indoor mm-wave networks with multiple reflections, we investigate the challenges and potential solutions of downlink multi-user multi-beam transmission, which can be described as a beamspace multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technique. We first exploit the characteristic of MBS/MUEs supporting multiple beams simultaneously to improve the efficiency of multi-user BF training. Then, we analyze the inter-user interference to avoid beam selection conflicts. Furthermore, we propose blockage control strategies and multi-user multi-beam power allocation solutions for the beamspace MU-MIMO. The theoretical and numerical results demonstrate that the beamspace MU-MIMO compared with single beam transmission can largely improve the rate performance and robustness of mm-wave networks.