Power consumption of multiuser (MU) precoding is a major concern in all-digital massive MU multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) basestations with hundreds of antenna elements operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies. We propose to replace part of the linear Wiener filter (WF) precoding matrix by a Finite-Alphabet WF Precoding (FAWP) matrix, which enables the use of low-precision hardware that consumes low power and area. To minimize the performance loss of our approach, we present methods that efficiently compute mean-square error (MSE)-optimal FAWP matrices. Our results show that FAWP matrices are able to approach infinite-precision error-rate and error vector magnitude performance with only 3-bit precoding weights, even when operating under realistic mmWave propagation conditions. Hence, FAWP is a promising approach to substantially reduce power consumption and silicon area in all-digital mmWave massive MU-MIMO systems.
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Hardware-Aware Beamspace Precoding for All-Digital mmWave Massive MU-MIMO
Massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) wireless systems operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies enable simultaneous wideband data transmission to a large number of users. In order to reduce the complexity of MU precoding in all-digital basestation architectures that equip each antenna element with a pair of data converters, we propose a two-stage precoding architecture which first generates a sparse precoding matrix in the beamspace domain, followed by an inverse fast Fourier transform that converts the result to the antenna domain. The sparse precoding matrix requires a small amount of multipliers and enables regular hardware architectures, which allows the design of hardware-efficient all-digital precoders. Simulation results demonstrate that our methods approach the error-rate performance of conventional Wiener filter precoding with more than 2x lower complexity.
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- PAR ID:
- 10295783
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Communications Letters
- ISSN:
- 1089-7798
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 1
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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