Hybrid Beamforming Optimization for DOA Estimation Based on the CRB Analysis

Direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is one of the most demanding tasks for the millimeter wave (mmWave) communication of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with the hybrid beamforming (HBF) architecture. In this letter, we focus on the optimization of the HBF matrix for receiving pilots to enhance the DOA estimation performance. Motivated by the fact that many existing DOA estimation algorithms can achieve the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB), we formulate the HBF optimization problem aiming at minimizing the CRB with the prior knowledge of the rough DOA range. Then, to tackle the problem with intractable non-convex constraints introduced by the analog beamformers, we propose an efficient manifold optimization (MO) based algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the significant improvement of the proposed CRB-MO algorithm over the conventional HBF algorithms and provide insights for the HBF design in the beam training stage for practical applications.