Robust Hybrid Beamforming with Phased Antenna Arrays for Downlink SDMA in Indoor 60 GHz Channels

Abstract

A hybrid architecture is presented for downlink beamforming (BF) with phased antenna arrays (PAA) in indoor 60 GHz spatial division multiple access (SDMA) channels. To manage the multiple access and inter-symbol interferences (MAI/ISI) encountered in SDMA with limited feedbacks, a cost-effective time-domain hybrid BF (HBF) method is presented to exploit the directivity provided by PAA in radio frequency (RF) beam patterns and the spatial diversity offered by multiple baseband processing modules. To maintain signal qualities under unpredictable MAI/ISI in wireless multimedia streaming to which indoor 60 GHz radio mainly applies, robust beamformers are designed to maintain the signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for each user with minimum total transmit power. The percentages in which the target SINRs can be satisfied with the proposed HBF schemes are found sensitive to uncertainties in the phase shifters of PAA. Two kinds of robust formulations are thus proposed to jointly combat the MAI, ISI and phase uncertainties. Robust beamformers with semi closed-form expressions can be obtained with a nonlinear kind of them, whose SINR satisfaction ratio can attain 80% or more by extensive simulations in an indoor two-user 60 GHz environment if RF beam patterns of the users do not highly overlap in space.