Efficient Hybrid Beamforming Design in mmWave Massive MU-MIMO DF Relay Systems with the Mixed-Structure

In this paper, we consider the decode-and-forward (DF) relay system in millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, and propose a hybrid beamforming design method for the mixed structure, which contains the fully-connected and sub-connected structures. To satisfy constant-modulus and block-diagonalization (BD) constraints, the analog beamforming is designed by the idea of sorted successive interference cancellation (SSIC). More specifically, the proposed method first sorts the capacities of different analog sub-channels in descending order, and then designs the analog beamforming serially according to the order of the capacities. To efficiently mitigate the inner-user and inter-user interference, we propose a modified baseband BD technology to reduce the information loss in digital beamforming design, thereby improving the system capacity. In addition, the proposed hybrid beamforming algorithm is designed by considering both uniform linear arrays (ULAs) and uniform planar arrays (UPAs). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid beamforming design scheme can obtain good performance in terms of the achievable sum-rate and power efficiency in ULAs and UPAs.