An Efficient Interference-Aware Constrained Massive MIMO Beamforming for mm-Wave JSDM

Low-complexity beamformer design with practical constraints is an attractive research area for hybrid analog/digital systems in mm-wave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This paper investigates interference-aware pre-beamformer (analog beamformer) design for joint spatial division and multiplexing (JSDM) which is a user-grouping based two-stage beamforming method. Single-carrier frequency domain equalization (SC-FDE) is employed in uplink frequency-selective channels. First, unconstrained slowly changing statistical analog beamformer of each group, namely, generalized eigenbeamformer (GEB) which has strong interference suppression capability is designed by maximizing the mutual information in reduced dimension. Then, constant-modulus constrained approximations of unconstrained beamformer are obtained by utilizing alternating minimization algorithms for fully connected arrays and fixed subarrays. In addition, a dynamic subarray algorithm is proposed where the connections between radio frequency (RF) chains and antennas are changed with changing channel statistics. Convergence of the proposed alternating minimization-based algorithms is provided along with their complexity analysis. It is observed that the additional complexity of proposed algorithms is insignificant for the overall system design. Although most of the interference is suppressed with the help of proposed constrained beamformers, there may be some residual interference after analog beamforming stage. Thus, minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion based iterative block decision feedback equalization (IB-DFE) method, which takes the residual interference in reduced dimension into account, is promoted for digital beamforming stage. Simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed interference-aware constrained design over existing approaches in terms of beampattern, spectral efficiency, outage capacity, bit-error rate (BER), and channel estimation accuracy.