Optimal Hybrid Beamforming Design for Millimeter-Wave Massive Multi-User MIMO Relay Systems

As a promising technology in the next generation mobile network, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication can mitigate the spectrum crunch of improving the network capacity by exploiting the large underutilized spectrum bands of the mmWave frequencies. The hybrid (analog/digital) beamforming of multi-data streams are widely used to further the spectrum efficiency of mmWave relay system when faced with the complex environment or long distance communication. This paper investigates the hybrid beamforming scheme for the decode-and-forward (DF) mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay system with mixed structure and full-connected structure. We optimize hybrid beamforming of relay system by maximizing the sum rate of the overall system as an objective function. To reduce the computational complexity, we reformulate the original problem as two single-hop mmWave MIMO sum-rate maximization subproblems. Then, the piecewise successive approximation method is proposed based on the criterion which jointly designs the analog and digital beamforming stages by trying to avoid the loss of information at each stage. The hybrid beamforming of the two subproblems can be solved by the proposed scheme united with the idea of successive interference cancelation (SIC), the baseband block diagonalization (BD) scheme, and waterfilling power allocation method. Finally, simulation results confirm that the proposed optimal method can achieve good performance in hybrid beamforming design of relay system with both mixed and full-connected structures.