Energy efficient and low complexity techniques for the next generation millimeter wave hybrid MIMO systems

The fifth generation (and beyond) wireless communication systems require increased capacity, high data rates, improved coverage and reduced energy consumption. This can be potentially provided by unused available spectrum such as the Millimeter Wave (MmWave) frequency spectrum above 30 GHz. The high bandwidths for mmWave communication compared to sub-6 GHz microwave frequency bands must be traded off against increased path loss, which can be compensated using large-scale antenna arrays such as the Multiple-Input Multiple- Output (MIMO) systems. The analog/digital Hybrid Beamforming (HBF) architectures for mmWave MIMO systems reduce the hardware complexity and power consumption using fewer Radio Frequency (RF) chains and support multi-stream communication with high Spectral Efficiency (SE). Such systems can also be optimized to achieve high Energy Efficiency (EE) gains with low complexity but this has not been widely studied in the literature. This PhD project focussed on designing energy efficient and low complexity communication techniques for next generation mmWave hybrid MIMO systems. Firstly, a novel architecture with a framework that dynamically activates the optimal number of RF chains was designed. Fractional programming was used to solve an EE maximization problem and the Dinkelbach Method (DM) based framework was exploited to optimize the number of active RF chains and the data streams. The DM is an iterative and parametric algorithm where a sequence of easier problems converge to the global solution. The HBF matrices were designed using a codebook-based fast approximation solution called gradient pursuit which was introduced as a cost-effective and fast approximation algorithm. This work maximizes EE by exploiting the structure of RF chains with full resolution sampling unlike existing baseline approaches that use fixed RF chains and aim only for high SE. Secondly, an efficient sparse mmWave channel estimation algorithm was developed with low resolution Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) at the receiver. The sparsity of the mmWave channel was exploited and the estimation problem was tackled using compressed sensing through the Stein's unbiased risk estimate based parametric denoiser. The Expectation-maximization density estimation was used to avoid the need to specify the channel statistics. Furthermore, an energy efficient mmWave hybrid MIMO system was developed with Digital-to- Analog Converters (DACs) at the transmitter where the best subset of the active RF chains and the DAC resolution were selected. A novel technique based on the DM and subset selection optimization was implemented for EE maximization. This work exploits the low resolution sampling at the converting units and provides more efficient solutions in terms of EE and channel estimation than existing baselines in the literature. Thirdly, the DAC and ADC bit resolutions and the HBF matrices were jointly optimized for EE maximization. The flexibility in choosing the bit resolution for each DAC and ADC was considered and they were optimized on a frame-by-frame basis unlike the existing approaches, based on the fixed resolution sampling. A novel decomposition of the HBF matrices to three parts was introduced to represent the analog beamformer matrix, the DAC/ADC bit resolution matrix and the baseband beamformer matrix. The alternating direction method of multipliers was used to solve this matrix factorization problem as it has been successfully applied to other non-convex matrix factorization problems in the literature. This work considers EE maximization with low resolution sampling at both the DACs and the ADCs simultaneously, and jointly optimizes the HBF and DAC/ADC bit resolution matrices, unlike the existing baselines that use fixed bit resolution or otherwise optimize either DAC/ADC bit resolution or HBF matrices