Low Complexity Hybrid Precoding and Channel Estimation Based on Hierarchical Multi-Beam Search for Millimeter-Wave MIMO Systems

In millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO systems, while a hybrid digital/analog precoding structure offers the potential to increase the achievable rate, it also faces the challenge of the need of a low-complexity design. In specific, the hybrid precoding may require matrix operations with a scale of antenna size, which is generally large in mmWave communication. Moreover, the channel estimation is also rather time consuming due to the large number of antennas at both Tx/Rx sides. In this paper, a low-complexity hybrid precoding and channel estimation approach is proposed. In the channel estimation phase, a hierarchical multi-beam search scheme is proposed to fast acquire NS (the number of streams) multipath components (MPCs)/clusters with the highest powers. In the hybrid precoding phase, the analog and digital precodings are decoupled. The analog precoding is designed to steer along the NS acquired MPCs/clusters at both Tx/Rx sides, shaping an equivalent NS×NS baseband channel, while the digital precoding performs operations in the baseband with the reduced-scale channel. Performance evaluations show that, compared with a state-of-the-art scheme, while achieving a close or even better performance when the number of radio-frequency (RF) chains or streams is small, both the computational complexity of the hybrid precoding and the time complexity of the channel estimation are greatly reduced.