Multimode precoding in millimeter wave MIMO transmitters with multiple antenna sub-arrays

Millimeter wave (mmWave) systems must use beamforming to overcome the heavy attenuation at mmWave frequencies and establish high-quality communication links with reasonably high spectral efficiency. When received signal power is sufficiently large and the propagation channel is sufficiently rich, beamforming with multiple data streams, known as precoding, could further increase data rates in mmWave systems. The high cost of digital devices in mmWave systems, however, implies that precoding is predominantly done in the analog domain, making mmWave precoding significantly more constrained than traditional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) solutions. In this paper, we propose an iterative precoding algorithm for a practical mmWave transmitter architecture in which all precoding is done in the analog domain. In addition to precoding, the proposed algorithm allows the mmWave system to adapt the rank of its transmission in response to varying propagation conditions. We present numerical results showing that the proposed multimode precoding algorithm allows systems to achieve large data rates, in some cases approaching channel capacity.