Hybrid Beamforming for Multi-User Millimeter-Wave Heterogeneous Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications are a critical technique with next-generation network characteristics such as ultra-dense small cells can meet the skyrocketing demand for mobile data. Hybrid precoding, which combines analog and digital processing to provide both spatial diversity gains and beamforming, is commonly studied for mmWave communications to lower the power and cost consumption of radio frequency (RF) networks. However, the combination of ultra-dense small cells and ever-increasing data traffic results in massive interference. In this paper, we propose a minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based hybrid beamforming strategy for downlink mmWave MIMO two-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The analog beamforming is generalized by an orthogonal matching pursuit technique. The analog beamforming problem is formulated as a sparse signal recovery problem. An MMSE-based digital beamforming algorithm is proposed to minimize the sum MSE of the user-intended data streams so that the inter- and intra-tier interferences are mitigated iteratively. The simulation results demonstrate the advantageous performance of the proposed hybrid beamforming schemes under different cellular cooperation and data transmission scenarios when hardware constraints are taken into account.