IET Communications

Research Article

Joint hybrid precoder and combiner design ISSN 1751-8628

Received on 15th March 2017
Revised 11th July 2017
for multi-stream transmission in mmWave Accepted on 27th August 2017
E-First on 20th November 2017
MIMO systems doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263
www.ietdl.org

Ming Li1, Zihuang Wang1, Xiaowen Tian1, Qian Liu2

1School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning 116024, People's Republic of China
2School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, Liaoning 116024, People's Republic of China
E-mail: qianliu@dlut.edu.cn

Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications have been considered as a key technology for future 5G wireless
networks since it can provide orders-of-magnitude wider bandwidth than current cellular bands. To overcome the severe
propagation loss of the mmWave channel, an economic and energy-efficient analogue/digital hybrid precoding and combining
transceiver architecture is widely used in mmWave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The digital
precoding/combining layer offers more freedom than pure analogue one and enables multi-stream transmission. In this study,
the authors consider the problem of codebook-based joint hybrid precoder and combiner design for multi-stream transmission in
mmWave MIMO systems. The authors propose to jointly select an analogue precoder and combiner pair for each data stream
successively, which can maximise the channel gain as well as suppress the interference between different data streams. Then,
the digital precoder and combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband channel to further mitigate the
interference and maximise the sum-rate. Both fully-connected and partially-connected hybrid beamforming structures are
investigated. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms exhibit prominent advantages in combating
interference between different data streams and offer satisfactory performance improvements compared with the existing
codebook-based hybrid beamforming schemes.

1 Introduction higher carrier frequency and wider bandwidth. Recently, economic

Due to the rapid proliferation of wireless devices, demand for data
traffic has been growing exponentially in recent years. This flood
of mobile traffic has significantly exacerbated the spectrum
congestion at the current wireless frequency bands and stimulated
extensive interests on exploiting new spectrum bands for wireless
communications. Millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless
communications, operating in the frequency bands from 30 to 300
GHz, have been demonstrated to be a promising candidate in recent
experiments and are defining a new era of wireless
communications due to the significantly large and unexploited
mmWave frequency bands [1–3].
However, before the deployment of mmWave communication
systems, there are several hurdles that need to be overcome.
Compared with the conventional frequency bands (e.g. 2.4 and 5
GHz), the propagation loss in the mmWave band is much higher
due to atmospheric absorption, rain attenuation, and low
penetration as a result of the ten-fold increase of the carrier
frequency [4]. Fortunately, the smaller wavelength of mmWave
signals enables a large antenna array to be packed in a small
physical dimension at the transceiver ends. With the aid of pre/
post-coding techniques in massive multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) systems, the large antenna array can provide sufficient
beamforming gain to overcome the severe propagation loss of the
mmWave channel as well as enable the transmission of multiple
data streams resulting in significant spectral efficiency
improvements.
For MIMO systems operating in conventional cellular
frequency band, the full-digital precoder and combiner are entirely
realised in the digital domain to adjust both the magnitude and
phase of the signals. Nevertheless, these conventional full-digital
schemes require a large number of expensive and energy-intensive
radio frequency (RF) chains, analogue-to-digital converters
(ADCs), and digital-to-analogue converters (DACs). The
prohibitive cost and power consumption of RF chains and ADCs/
DACs make full-digital precoding and combining schemes
impractical in mmWave communication systems due to much
and energy-efficient analogue/digital hybrid precoder and combiner
have been advocated as a newly-emerged technique to tackle this
issue.
The hybrid precoding/combining approach applies a large
number of analogue phase shifters to implement high-dimesional
RF precoder to compensate the large path-loss at mmWave bands,
and a small number of RF chains for a low-dimensional digital
precoder to provide the necessary flexibility to perform advanced
multiplexing/multiuser techniques. According to the mapping from
RF chains to antennas, the hybrid precoding/combining structures
can be categorised into the fully-connected and partially-connected
architectures, as illustrated in Figs. 1a and b, respectively. In the
fully-connected architecture, each RF chain is connected to all
antennas via a large number of phase shifters and enjoys the full
beamforming gain. In contrast, the partially-connected architecture,
in which each RF chain is connected to only a set of the antennas,
can significantly reduce the number of required phase shifters and
is expected to be more energy efficient by sacrificing a certain
beamforming gain.
The research on the hybrid precoder and combiner for mmWave
communications has attracted extensive attention in recent years
due to the special characteristic of mmWave massive MIMO
channel which results in superior efficiency. The major challenge
in designing hybrid precoder and combiner is the practical
constraints of the RF precoders, such as a constant modulus, which
is usually imposed by phase shifters. Thus, the hybrid precoder/
combiner design is deemed as solving various matrix factorisation
problems with constant modulus constraints of the analogue
precoder. The existing hybrid design schemes usually decompose
the complicated joint transmitter–receiver design into a serious
simpler problems [5]. In particular, the hybrid precoder
optimisation problem at the transmitter side is firstly considered
while assuming an optimal combiner is implemented at the
receiver, then design the hybrid combiner given the obtained
precoder. Since the two sequential transmitter–receiver design
problems can be solved using a similar method, the original non-
convex spectral efficiency optimisation problem is significantly

IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604 2596

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017

Fig. 1 mmWave MIMO system with hybrid precoder and combiner
simplified. A popular solution to design the hybrid precoder/
combiner based on the spectral efficiency maximisation of point-
to-point mmWave communications is to minimise the Euclidean
distance between the hybrid precoder/combiner and the full-digital
precoder/combiner.
The existing hybrid precoding designs typically assume the use
of infinite resolution phase shifters for implementing the analogue
beamformers. In [5, 6], the authors proposed to iteratively design
the analogue and digital precoder to approximate the unconstrained
precoder. In [7], a novel full-digital approximation method was
introduced, where the analogue precoder was directly chosen to
match the phase of singular vectors of channel with constant
magnitude before optimising the digital precoder. The researches
on hybrid precoding applied in partially-connected architectures
are also studied in [8–10]. A successive interference cancellation
based hybrid precoding scheme is proposed in [8, 9], where the
hybrid precoders for each sub-array are successively designed. In
[10], the analogue precoder and combiner were first iteratively
designed, then digital precoder and combiner were optimised based
on the effective MIMO channel. All of these hybrid designs with
infinite phase shifters can achieve satisfactory performance. While
the components for realising accurate phase shifters could be very
complicated and expensive, low-resolution phase shifters with
discrete/quantised phases are cost-effective and typically adopted
in realistic systems [11–13]. The performance lower bound of the
hybrid beamformer with quantised-phase shifters is derived in [12].
Furthermore, according to the special characteristic of mmWave
channel, more practical codebook-based hybrid precoder designs
have been widely used [14–19], in which the columns of the
analogue precoder are selected from certain candidate vectors, such
as array response vectors of the channel and discrete Fourier
transform (DFT) beamformers, which have constant modulus and
discrete phases. In these codebook-based hybrid precoder designs,
orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) is a typical algorithm which
can be seen as a sparsity constrained matrix reconstruction
problem. In [20], the authors proposed a Turbo-like beamforming
scheme to seek the optimal pair of analogue precoder and combiner
with low searching complexity but near-optimal performance.
In the existing codebook-free or codebook-based algorithms
mentioned above, the optimal hybrid precoder and combiner are
individually designed to approximate, in the best Frobenius norm,
the right and left singular vectors of the channel matrix,
receptively. While the separate design for hybrid precoder and
combiner can provide satisfactory performance in terms of spectral
efficiency, orthogonality of resulting spatial multiplexing channel
cannot be guaranteed [14]. Therefore, the conventional hybrid
precoder and combiner designs may cause significant performance
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
loss in practical mmWave multiplexing systems. This motivates us
to reconsider the hybrid precoder and combiner design and find a
better way for the multiple data streams transmission in mmWave
MIMO communications.
In this paper, we consider the problem of codebook-based joint
hybrid precoder and combiner design for multi-stream transmission
in mmWave MIMO systems. We first focus on the fully-connected
structure and propose to jointly select the analogue precoder and
combiner pair for each data stream successively, which can
maximise the channel gain as well as suppress the interference
between different data streams. Then, the digital precoder and
combiner are computed based on the obtained effective baseband
channel to further mitigate the interference and maximise the sum-
rate. Then this joint hybrid precoder and combiner design scheme
is extended to partially-connected architectures, where each
analogue precoder and combiner pair of the transmit and receive
sub-array pair is selected one by one to enhance the corresponding
sub-channel gain as well as mitigate the inter sub-array
interference. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed
algorithms exhibit prominent advantages in combating the effect of
interference between different data streams in both fully-connected
and partially-connected structures and offer satisfactory
performance improvements compared with the existing codebook-
based hybrid beamforming schemes.
The following notation is used throughout this paper. Bolditalic
lower-case letters indicate column vectors and bolditalic face
upper-case letters indicate matrices; ℂ denotes the set of all
complex numbers; ( ⋅ )T and ( ⋅ )H denote the transpose and
transpose-conjugate operation, respectively. Following the matrix
indexing rule which is widely used in Matlab, we use A(: , i) to
denote the ith column of a matrix A. IL is the L × L identity matrix;
E{ ⋅ } represents statistical expectation. Finally, | ⋅ |, ∥ ⋅ ∥, and
∥ ⋅ ∥F are the scalar magnitude, vector norm, and Frobenius norm,
respectively.
2 System model and problem formulation
2.1 System model
We consider a single-user mmWave MIMO multiplexing system
with hybrid precoder and combiner as illustrated in Fig. 1a. The
transmitter employs Nt antennas and NtRF RF chains to
simultaneously transmit Ns data streams to the receiver which is
equipped with Nr antennas and NrRF RF chains. To ensure the
efficiency of the communication with a limited number of RF
chains, the number of data streams is constrained as
2597

Ns = NtRF = NrRF, while the results can be applied to the general
cases.
The transmitted symbols are firstly processed by a baseband
RF
precoder FBB ∈ ℂNt × Ns, then up-converted to the RF domain via
NtRF RF chains before being precoded with an analogue precoder
FRF of dimension Nt × NtRF. While the baseband precoder FBB
enables both amplitude and phase modifications, the analogue
precoder FRF has a constant amplitude 1/ Nt for each element
since it is implemented using analogue phase shifters.
The discrete-time transmitted signal can be written as
x = FRFFBBs (1)
where s is the Ns × 1 symbol vector such that E{ssH} = (1/Ns)INs
The total transmit power constraint is enforced by normalising FBB
such that ∥ FRFFBB ∥2F = Ns.
For simplicity, we consider a narrowband block-fading
propagation channel, which yields a receive signal as
y = PHFRFFBBs + n, (2)
where y is the Nr × 1 received vector, H is the Nr × Nt channel
matrix, P represents the average receive power, and
n ∼ CN(0, σn2 INr) is the complex Gaussian noise vector corrupting
the receive signal.
The receiver uses its NrRF RF chains and phase shifters to
process the obtained receive signal which has a form of
H H H H
s^ = PWBB WRF HFRFFBBs + WBB WRF n (3)
where WRF is the Nr × NrRF
analogue RF combiner, WBB is the
RF
Nr × Ns digital baseband combiner and normalised to satisfy
∥ WRFWBB ∥F2 = Ns.
In this study, we implicitly assume perfect timing and frequency
recovery and the channel state information (CSI) of H is known
perfectly and instantaneously to both transmitter and receiver. In
practice, CSI can be accurately and efficiently obtained by channel
estimation at the receiver [15] and further shared at the transmitter
with effective feedback techniques.
2.2 Millimeter wave MIMO channel model
Due to high free-space pathloss and large tightly-packed antenna
arrays, the mmWave propagation in a massive MIMO system is
well characterised by a limited spatial selectivity or scattering
model, e.g. the Saleh–Valenzuela model, which allows us to
accurately capture the mathematical structure in mmWave channels
[14]. The matrix channel H is assumed to be a sum contribution of
Ncl scattering clusters, each of which provides Nray propagation
paths to the channel matrix H. Therefore, the discrete-time narrow-
band mmWave channel H can be formulated as
N N
NtNr cl ray
Nc1Nray i∑ ∑ αilΛr(θilr )Λt(θilt )ar(θilr )at(θilt )H,
H= (4)
=1l=1
where αil ∼ CN(0, σα2 , i) is the complex gain of the lth propagation
path (ray) in the ith scattering cluster, following independent
identically distributed (i.i.d.) form. σα2 , i represents the average
power of the ith cluster, and the total power satisfies
N
∑i =cl 1 σα2 , i = Nc1. θilt and θilr are the angle of departure (AoD) and the
angle of arrival (AoA), respectively, which are assumed to be
Laplacian-distributed with a mean cluster angle θit and θir as well as
an angle spread of σθit and σθir. The functions Λt(θilt ) and Λr(θilr )
represent the transmit and receive antenna element gain associated
with the corresponding AoD and AoA. If ideal antenna elements
are assumed, Λt(θilt ) can be given by
2598
17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
t t t
Λt(θilt ) = 1, θil ∈ [θmin, θmax], (5)
0, otherwise.
Finally, the array response vectors ar(θ) and at(θ) are the antenna
array response vectors, which only depend on the antenna array
structures. When the commonly used uniform linear arrays (ULAs)
are considered, the receive antenna array response vector can be
written as
1
ar(θ) = [1, e j(2π / λ)dsin(θ), …, e j(Nr − 1)(2π / λ)dsin(θ)]T, (6)
Nr
where λ is the signal wavelength, and d is the distance between
antenna elements. The transmit array response vector at(θ) can be
written in a similar fashion.
2.3 Problem formulation
We consider the problem of codebook-based hybrid precoder and
combiner design in a mmWave multiplexing system. Specifically,
let ℱ and W denote the beamsteering codebooks for the analogue
precoder and combiner, respectively. If BtRF (BrRF) bits are used to
quantise the AoD (AoA), ℱ and W will consist of all the possible
analogue precoder and combiner vectors [17], which can be
presented as
RF RF
ℱ = {at(2πi/2Bt ): i = 1, …, 2Bt }, (7)
RF RF
W = {ar(2πi/2Br ): i = 1, …, 2Br } . (8)
The columns of analogue precoding (combining) matrix FRF (WRF)
are picked from candidate vectors in ℱ (W), i.e.
f RFl ∈ ℱ, ∀l = 1, …, NtRF, wRFl ∈ W, ∀l = 1, …, NrRF.
When Gaussian symbols are transmitted over the mmWave
MIMO channel, the achieved spectral efficiency is given by [14]
P −1 H H
R = log2 INs + R W W HF F
Ns n BB RF RF BB
(9)
H H
× FBB FRF HWRFWBB ,
H H
where Rn ≜ σn2 WBB WRF WRFWBB is the noise covariance matrix
after combining.
While most existing hybrid precoder and combiner design
algorithms aim to maximise spectral efficiency in (9), we should
note that it is actually a performance upper bound for a general
MIMO system. When we use simple precoder and combiner to
implement spatial multiplexing, we are more interested in the
signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) or the rate of each
stream, rather than the spectral efficiency of the MIMO system.
Even though precoder and combiner designed by approximating
the right and left singular vectors of the channel matrix can provide
satisfactory spectral efficiency performance, they cannot guarantee
the orthogonality of the resulting effective spatial multiplexing
channel for the multiple data streams transmission and
consequently have low sum-rate performance. Therefore, for a
practical spatial multiplexing system, the sum-rate of all the data
streams is a more reasonable and practical performance metric
which is described as follows.
Given the received signal in (3), the SINR of the kth data stream
is formulated by
γk
(10)
(P/Ns) ∣ W(: , k)HHF(: , k) ∣2
= N
(P/Ns)∑i =s 1, i ≠ k ∣ W(: , k)HHF(: , i) ∣2 + σn2 ∥ W(: , k) ∥2
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
 17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
where F ≜ FRFFBB and W ≜ WRFWBB. The achievable sum-rate of eliminating such a series of orthogonal components of previously
the spatial multiplexing system is determined analogue beamformer pairs. Particularly, before finding
the second (i.e. k = 2) analogue precoder and combiner pair, we
Ns need to update channel as
Rsum = ∑ log(1 + γk) . (11)
~ (2) ~ (1)
k=1 H = (INr − q1q1H)H (INt − p1 p1H) (16)
In this study, we aim to jointly design the precoders FRF, FBB
and then execute searching precessing as
and combiners WRF, WBB to maximise the sum-rate of the
mmWave multiplexing system, which can be formulated as ⋆ ⋆ H ~ (2)
f RF 2
, wRF2
= arg max | wRF H f RF | .
wRF ∈ W (17)
Ns f RF ∈ ℱ
⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆
FRF, FBB, WRF, WBB = arg max ∑ log 1 + γk
k=1
The analogue precoders and combiners for the rest data streams
s.t. FRF(: , l) ∈ ℱ, ∀l = 1, …, NtRF, can be successively selected using the above procedure. Note that
(12) when k > 1, the orthogonormal component pk and qk of the
WRF(: , l) ∈ W, ∀l = 1, …, NrRF, ⋆ ⋆
selected precoder and combiner f RF and wRF should be obtained
∥ FRFFBB ∥F2 = Ns, k k
by a Gram–Schmidt based procedure
∥ WRFWBB ∥F2 = Ns .
k−1

The optimisation problem of (12) is obviously a non-convex

⋆
pk = f RF k
− ∑ piH f RF pi,
⋆
k
i=1
non-deterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard) problem. In the next
section, we turn to seek a sub-optimal joint hybrid precoder and
combiner design to reduce the complexity but still achieve a pk = pk / ∥ pk ∥ , k = 2, …, Ns; (18)
satisfactory performance.
k−1
⋆
qk = wRF k
− ∑ qiHwRF qi,⋆
k
3 Proposed joint hybrid precoder and combiner i=1
design for a fully-connected structure
qk = qk / ∥ qk ∥ , k = 2, …, Ns . (19)
To implement an efficient multiplexing system and maximise the
sum-rate in (11), we need to design the precoder and combiner
which can enhance the channel gain of each data stream as well as After all analogue beamformer pairs have been determined, we
suppress the interference from each other. To this end, we propose can obtain the effective baseband channel
to decompose the difficult optimisation problem in (12) into a ⋆ H ⋆
series of sub-optimal problems which are much easier to be solved. Heff = (WRF) HFRF (20)
In particular, by considering each transmit/receive RF chain pair
⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆
one by one, we successively select analogue precoder and where FRF ≜ [ f RF 1
, …, f RF Ns
] and WRF ≜ [wRF 1
, …, wRF Ns
]. For
combiner to maximise the corresponding channel gain while baseband precoder and combiner design, we perform singular value
suppressing the co-channel interference. Then, the baseband digital decomposition (SVD) [14]
precoder and combiner are computed to further mitigate the
interference and maximise the sum-rate.
Heff = UΣV H, (21)
For the first data stream channel (i.e. k = 1), we attempt to find
⋆ ⋆
the optimal analogue precoder and combiner pair ( f RF , wRF ) from
1 1
where U and V are Ns × Ns unitary matrices, Σ is an Ns × Ns
the codebooks to obtain the largest beamforming gain
diagonal matrix of singular values arranged in the decreasing order.
⋆ ⋆ H
Then, an SVD-based baseband digital precoder is employed to
f RF 1
, wRF1
= arg max | wRF H f RF| further suppress the interference and maximise the sum-rate
wRF ∈ W (13)
f RF ∈ ℱ
⋆
FBB = V, (22)
which can be easily solved by searching all candidate vectors in ℱ
⋆
⋆
and W with computational complexity O( | ℱ | | W | ). Assign f RF 1
WBB =U (23)
⋆
and wRF1 to the precoding and combining matrices ⋆ ⋆
Finally, we normalise baseband precoder FBB and combiner WBB
⋆
FRF(: , 1) = f RF1, ⋆
(14) by
⋆
⋆ ⋆ NsFBB
WRF (: , 1) = wRF 1
. (15) ⋆
FBB = ⋆
⋆ ,
∥ FRFFBB ∥F
⋆
(24)
For the rest Ns − 1 data streams, we attempt to successively ⋆ NsWBB
WBB = ⋆ ⋆ .
select precoders and combiners to actively avoid the interference of ∥ WRF WBB ∥F
the data streams whose precoders and combiners have been
determined. In particular, the component of previously determined This joint hybrid precoder and combiner design algorithm is
precoders and combiners should be removed from other data summarised in Fig. 2.
streams' channels in such a way that the similar analogue precoders
and combiners would not be selected for the other data streams. To
~ (1) 4 Hybrid precoder and combiner design for
achieve this goal, we first initialise H = H which is going to be
partially-connected stucture
updated successively in each step of selecting the analogue
⋆
beamformer pair. Let p1 ≜ f RF ⋆
and q1 ≜ wRF be the components of In the partially-connected architecture as shown in Fig. 1b, the
1 1
the determined analogue precoder and combinder for the first data digital domain signal from each RF chain is delivered to only
stream, respectively. Then, before choosing the next analogue Mt = Nt /NtRF phase shifters to perform the analogue precoding.
precoder and combiner pair, the channel should be updated by After the analogue precoding, each data stream is transmitted by a

IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604 2599

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
 17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
system and decompose the difficult optimisation problem into a
series of sub-optimal problems which only consider one transmit
and receive sub-array pair. In particular, let
Hk = H((k − 1)Mr + 1: kMr, (k − 1)Mt + 1: kMt) ∈ ℂMr × Mt denote
the sub-channel for the kth data stream, i.e. form the kth transmit
sub-array to the kth receive sub-array. Similarly, we propose to
successively select the analogue precoder and combiner pairs for
each data stream channel based on the following optimisation:
⋆ ⋆ H
f RF k
, wRF k
= arg max wRF Hk f RF .
wRF ∈ W (26)
f RF ∈ ℱ

Note that the codebooks ℱ and W in the sub-array structure are

comprised of a series of Mt × 1 and Mr × 1 beam vectors,
⋆ ⋆
respectively. Then f RFk
and wRFk
are assigned as

⋆ ⋆
FRF((k − 1)Mt + 1: kMt, k) = f RF k
,
⋆ ⋆
(27)
WRF ((k − 1)Mr + 1: kMr, k) = wRF k
.

If k > 1, the contribution of previous determined sub-antenna-

Fig. 2 Hybrid precoder and combiner design for fully-connected structure arrays should be eliminated from the untreated sub-channels by
k−1 k−1
~
Hk = IMr − ∑ didiH Hk IM − ∑ bibiH ,
t
(28)
i=1 i=1

where bk ∈ ℂMt × 1 and dk ∈ ℂMr × 1 play the same roles as pk and qk.
⋆ ⋆
Particularly, when k = 1, let bk = f RF k
and dk = wRF k
; when k > 1,
we utilise the Gram–Schmidt procedure to find the orthogonormal
vectors as
k−1
⋆
bk = f RF k
− ∑ biH f RF bi,
⋆
k
i=1

bk = bk / ∥ bk ∥ , k = 2, …, Ns; (29)

k−1
⋆
dk = wRF k
− ∑ diHwRF di,⋆
k
i=1

dk = dk / ∥ dk ∥ , k = 2, …, Ns . (30)
~
Then we replace Hk in (26) with the updated sub-channel Hk.
After RF precoder and combiner for all sub-antenna-array pairs
⋆ ⋆
are obtained, the digital precoder FBB and combiner WBB can be
computed based on the effective baseband channel using a similar
procedure with (20)–(24). The final joint hybrid precoder and
combiner design for partially-connected architecture is summarised
in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3 Hybrid precoder and combiner design for partially-connected
structure 5 Complexity analysis
In this section, we analyse the complexity of the proposed joint
sub-antenna-array with only Mt antennas associated with the hybrid precoder and combiner designs and provide a comparison
corresponding RF chain. Therefore, analogue precoding matrix FRF on the computation complexity with other codebook-based
has a different structure as follows schemes.
For the fully-connected architectures, we notice that the
f1 0 … 0 required multiplications for every beamformer pair's selection is
0 f2 0 |ℱ | | W | (NtNr + Nr). Moreover, seen from Fig. 2, in the kth
FRF = (25) iteration, the computation complexity mainly comes from the
⋮ ⋱ ⋮ ~ (k + 1)
correction of pk and qk, as well as the update of H which
0 0 … f NtRF
requires
where f k, k = 1, …, NtRF denotes the Mt × 1 steering vector for the 3(k2 − k + 1)(Nt + Nr)
kth sub-antenna-array (or RF chain). The analogue combiner 2
matrix WRF has a similar construction.
The non-convex constraints on FRF and WRF make the multiplications and (NtNr + 1)(Nt + Nr) multiplications,
optimisation problem (12) very difficult to be solved. Therefore, respectively. Finally, the joint design scheme will perform SVD
we adopt a similar idea introduced in the fully-connected hybrid

2600 IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
 17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Table 1 Complexity comparison
Multiplications
Fig. 2 (2Ns3 + 10Ns − 1)(Nt + Nr)
O Ns | ℱ | | W | (NtNr + Nr) + 6
+ Ns3
Fig. 3 (3Ns3 + 9Ns − 2)(Mt + Mr)
O Ns | ℱ | | W | (NtNr + Nr) + 6
+ Ns3
SSP [14] 1
O NtNr2 + Ns2( | ℱ |2 + | W |2 + | ℱ | Nt + | W | Nr + NtNr + 3Nr2) + 4Ns3(Nt + Nr + 2 Ns) + | W | Nr2 + Ns

with complexity O(Ns3) to obtain the digital precoder and combiner.

Similarly, for the partially-connected architectures, in each iteration
the joint design algorithm needs |ℱ | | W | (MtMr + Mr)
multiplications for analogue beamformer pair's selection,

3(k2 − k + 1)(Mt + Mr)

2

multiplications to update bk and dk,

k2 − k
Mt Mr + (Mt + Mr)
2
~
multiplications to compute Hk. Besides, SVD computation is also
required to obtain the digital precoder and combiner. The total
computational complexity is summarised in Table 1, in which we
also include the complexity of the most widely-used codebook-
based spatially sparse precoding scheme [14] for the comparison
purpose.

6 Simulation results
In this section, we illustrate the simulation results of the proposed
joint hybrid precoder and combiner design. We first consider a
mmWave MIMO multiplexing system with fully-connected hybrid
architecture. Both transmitter and receiver are equipped with a
128-antenna ULA and antenna spacing is d = λ/2. The number of
RF chains at transmitter and receiver is NtRF = NrRF = 4, so is the
number of data streams Ns = 4. The channel parameters are set as
Ncl = 10 clusters, Nray = 10 rays per cluster, and the average power
N
of the ith cluster is σα2 , i = c(7/10)i where c = (∑i =cl 1 (7/10)i)−1Ncl.
The azimuths of the AoAs/AoDs within a cluster are assumed to be
Laplacian-distributed with an angle spread of σθir = σθit = 2.5∘. The
mean cluster AoDs are assumed to be uniformly distributed over
[0, 2π] and the mean cluster AoAs are uniformly distributed over Fig. 4 Spectral efficiency and sum-rate performance in the fully-connected
an arbitrary π/3 sector. Finally, we employ a codebook consists of
structure. Nt = Nr = 128, NtRF = NrRF = 4, Ns = 4
array response vectors with 64 uniformly quantised angle
resolutions for the selection of analogue beamformers.
Fig. 4a shows the spectral efficiency versus signal-to-noise- In Figs. 5a and b, we turn to illustrate how the number of
transmit and receive antennas affects the spectral efficiency and
ratio (SNR) over 106 channel realizations. For a comparison
sum-rate performance. We assume Nt = Nr = N which is varying
purpose, we also include two state-of-the-art algorithms: (i)
spatially sparse precoding (SSP) in [14] which is a classic from 16 to 256. The SNR is set at 20 dB and NtRF = NrRF = Ns = 4.
codebook-based hybrid precoding design. [For a fair comparison, It can be observed from these two figures that the proposed
spatially sparse MMSE combining proposed in [14] is also used in algorithm has significant superiority compared with the SSP
the simulation.] (ii) Alternating minimisation using phase approach in the spectral efficiency as well as sum-rate
extraction (PE AltMin) algorithm in [5] which is a codebook-free performance. Interestingly, we also notice that the SSP scheme
hybrid precoding design. The optimal (OPT) full-digital may exhibit severe performance degradation with an increase in the
beamforming scheme with the unconstrained SVD algorithm is number of antennas when the resolution of codebook is relatively
also plotted as the performance benchmark. It can be observed that low. This is because that the performance of SSP depends heavily
our proposed algorithm outperforms the codebook-based SSP on the resolution of codebook and the number of antennas. When
algorithm. Note that the PE AltMin algorithm has a continuous either of the two factors is not large enough, the SSP algorithm
phase on a RF beamformer and can achieve extremely close may have performance degradation.
performance to the optimal full-digital approach. Therefore, we Figs. 6a and b provide spectral efficiency and sum-rate versus
just consider it as a reference for the codebook-free algorithms but the number of data streams Ns, respectively. The number of
would not compare it with our proposed algorithm. Fig. 4b presents transmit and receive RF chains are also changing along with Ns.
the sum-rate versus SNR with the same system settings as in Fig. We can see that three approaches can achieve comparable
4a. We can notice that the proposed joint hybrid precoder and performance in spectral efficiency. However, only our proposed
combiner design has significant performance advantages over the algorithm can maintain a satisfactory sum-rate achievement with
other two hybrid beamforming designs due to the fact that our joint the increasing number of data streams and the strong interference
analogue precoder and combiner selection approach aims to
mitigate the interference between different data streams.
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604 2601
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017

Fig. 5 Effects of the number of transceiver antennas in the fully-connected
structure
(a) Spectral efficiency, (b) Sum-rate performance. SNR=20 dB, NtRF = NrRF = 4,
Ns = 4
between different data streams can even cause a performance loss
when the SSP algorithm is applied.
Now we turn to demonstrate the proposed algorithm for the
partially-connected hybrid architecture and compare it with other
two classic algorithms: (i) Semi-definite relaxation-based
alternating minimisation (SDR) in [5], (ii) successive interference
cancellation-based hybrid precoding (SIC) in [8]. Again, these two
algorithms are codebook-free approaches. The spectral efficiency
and sum-rate performances with different values of SNR are
illustrated in Figs. 7a and b. We can observe that three algorithms
have very close performance in achieving a satisfactory spectral
efficiency even though the two schemes are both for codebook-free
based designs. The SDR and SIC design the hybrid precoder and
combiner separately to maximise the spectral efficiency and the
interference cannot be well mitigated. Therefore our proposed
algorithm presents significant performance advantages in sum-rate
for multiplexing transmissions. To the best of our knowledge, all
existing hybrid beamformer designs aim to maximise spectral
efficiency. The results obtained from this simulation prompt us to
pay attention to the inter-stream interference mitigation in the
multiplexing systems.
The number of antennas versus spectral efficiency is also shown
in Fig. 8a. We still assume Nt = Nr = N in the simulations. It can
be observed that the proposed algorithm can outperform the SDR
and SIC schemes when both the transmitter and receiver are
equipped with 128-ULAs, which is the most common number of
antennas applied during the previously demonstrated researches.
Sum-rate versus N is illustrated in Fig. 8b and our proposed
algorithm can always produce significant performance advantages.
Finally, we demonstrate the effect of the number of data streams
on the spectral efficiency and sum-rate in Figs. 9a and b,
respectively. With the different numbers of data streams, the
2602
17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Fig. 6 Effects of the number of data streams in the fully-connected
structure
(a) Spectral efficiency, (b) Sum-rate performance. Nt = Nr = 128, SNR=20 dB
numbers of transmitter and receiver RF chains/sub-arrays are also
assumed to change to satisfy NtRF = NrRF = Ns. Similar conclusions
can be drawn that our proposed algorithm does not exhibit obvious
weakness though finite-resolution codebook is applied. However,
the proposed scheme can also perform well in the sum-rate
performance, while the achievable sum-rate using SDR or SIC is
almost ruined due to the severe inter-stream interference.
7 Conclusions
This study considered the problem of codebook-based joint hybrid
precoder and combiner design for multi-stream transmission in
mmWave MIMO systems. We proposed to jointly select analogue
precoder and combiner pair for each data stream successively,
which can maximise the channel gain as well as suppress the
interference between different data streams. Then, the digital
precoder and combiner were computed based on the obtained
baseband effective channel to further mitigate the interference and
maximise the sum-rate. Both fully-connected and partially-
connected hybrid bemaforming structures were investigated.
Simulation results demonstrated the performance improvements of
our proposed algorithms compared with the existing codebook-
based hybrid beamforming schemes.
8 Acknowledgments
This study is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of
China (grant no. 61671101 and 61601080).
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017

Fig. 7 Spectral efficiency and sum-rate performance in the partially-connected structure. Nt = Nr = 128, NtRF = NrRF = 4, Ns = 4
Fig. 8 Effects of the number of transceiver antennas in the partially-connected structure
(a) Spectral efficiency, (b) Sum-rate performance. SNR=20 dB, NtRF = NrRF = 4, Ns = 4
Fig. 9 Effects of the number of data steams in the partially-connected structure
(a) Spectral efficiency, (b) Sum-rate performance. Nt = Nr = 128, SNR=20 dB
9 References
[1] Pi, Z., Khan, F.: ‘An introduction to millimeter-wave mobile broadband
systems’, IEEE Commun. Mag., 2011, 49, (6), pp. 101–107
[2] Rappaport, T., Sun, S., Mayzus, R., et al.: ‘Millimeter wave mobile
communications for 5G cellular: it will work!’, IEEE Access, 2013, 1, pp.
335–349
[3] Heath, R.W., González-Prelcic, N., Rangan, S., et al.: ‘An overview of signal
processing techniques for millimeter wave MIMO systems’, IEEE J. Sel. Top.
Signal Process., 2016, 10, (3), pp. 436–453
[4] Rappapport, T.S., MacCartney, G.R., Samimi, M.K., et al.: ‘Wideband
millimeter-wave propagation measurements and channel models for future
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017
17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
wireless communication system design’, IEEE Trans. Commun., 2015, 63,
(9), pp. 3029–3056
[5] Yu, X., Shen, J.-C., Zhang, J., et al.: ‘Alternating minimisation algorithms for
hybrid precoding in millimeter wave MIMO systems’, IEEE J. Sel. Top.
Signal Process., 2016, 10, (3), pp. 485–500
[6] Rusu, C., Méndez-Rial, R., González-Prelcic, N., et al.: ‘Low complexity
hybrid precoding strategies for millimeter wave communication systems’,
IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun., 2016, 15, (12), pp. 8380–8393
[7] López-Valcarce, R., González-Prelcic, N., Rusu, C., et al.: ‘Hybrid precoders
and combiners for mmWave MIMO systems with per-antenna power
constraints’. IEEE Global Communication Conf.(GLOBECOM), Washington,
DC, December 2016, pp. 1–6
2603

[8] Gao, X., Dai, L., Han, S.: ‘Energy-efficient hybrid analogue and digital
precoding for mmWave MIMO systems with large antenna arrays’, IEEE J.
Sel. Areas Commun., 2016, 34, (4), pp. 998–1009
[9] Dai, L., Gao, X., Quan, J., , et al.: ‘Near-optimal hybrid analogue and digital
precoding for downlink mmWave massive MIMO systems’. Proc. IEEE Int.
Conf. Commun. (ICC), London, UK, June 2015, pp. 1334–1339
[10] He, S., Qi, C., Wu, Y., , et al.: ‘Energy-efficient transceiver design for hybrid
sub-array architecture MIMO systems’, IEEE Access, 2016, 4, pp. 9895–9905
[11] Sohrabi, F., Yu, W.: ‘Hybrid digital and analogue beamforming design for
large-scale antenna arrays’, IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal Process., 2016, 10, (3),
pp. 501–513
[12] Payami, S., Ghoraishi, M., Dianati, M.: ‘Hybrid beamforming for large
antenna arrays with phase shifter selection’, IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun.,
2016, 15, (11), pp. 7258–7271
[13] Chen, J.-C.: ‘Hyrbrid beamforming with discrete phase shifters for
millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems’, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., 2017,
66, (8), pp. 7604–7608
[14] Ayach, O.E., Rajagopal, S., Abu-Surra, S., , et al.: ‘Spatially sparse precoding
in millimeter wave MIMO systems’, IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun., 2014, 13,
(3), pp. 1499–1513
2604
17518636, 2017, 17, Downloaded from https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-com.2017.0263 by Algeria Hinari NPL, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2024]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
[15] Alkhateeb, A., Ayach, O.E., Leus, G., , et al.: ‘Channel estimation and hybrid
precoding for millimeter wave cellular systems’, IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal
Process., 2014, 8, (5), pp. 831–846
[16] Chen, C.-E.: ‘An iterative hybrid transceiver design algorithm for millimeter
wave MIMO systems’, IEEE Wirel. Commun. Lett., 2015, 4, (3), pp. 285–288
[17] Alkhateeb, A., Leus, G., Heath, R.W.: ‘Limited feedback hybrid precoding for
multi-user millimeter wave systems’, IEEE Trans. Wirel. Commun., 2015, 14,
(11), pp. 6481–6494
[18] Kim, M., Lee, Y.: ‘MSE-based hybrid RF/baseband processing for millimeter
wave communication systems in MIMO interference channels’, IEEE Trans.
Veh. Technol., 2015, 64, (6), pp. 2714–2720
[19] Chen, J.-C.: ‘Efficient codebook-based beamforming algorithm for
millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems’, IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., 2017,
66, (9), pp. 7809–7817
[20] Gao, X., Dai, L., Yuen, C., , et al.: ‘Turbo-like beamforming based on tabu
search algorithm for millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems’, IEEE Trans.
Veh. Technol., 2016, 65, (7), pp. 5731–5737
IET Commun., 2017, Vol. 11 Iss. 17, pp. 2596-2604
© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2017