A Low Overhead Angle-based Beamforming Using Multi-Pattern Codebooks for mmWave Massive MIMO Systems

Abstract

In order to exploit the potential capacity of 5G, the combination of millimeter-wave (mmWave) and massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) techniques provides a promising solution through beamforming. However, the extremely high carrier frequency dramatically reduces the channel coherence time, leading to frequent channel estimation and substantially increased overhead for the conventional channel information based beamforming. In this paper, we propose an angle-based beamforming scheme to reduce the overhead of beamforming by increasing the beam serving period. A novel multi-zone beamforming technique is proposed to support users with different distance to base station (BS) adaptively, while the selected users in the same zone could be served for a longer period due to similar angular statistics. The simulation results show that the throughput of our scheme is close to the instantaneous beamforming, while the real minimum serving time of chosen beams is hundreds times of the channel coherence time.