On the Performance of Fully-Connected and Sub-Connected Hybrid Beamforming System

When the wireless communication system evolves to massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the system becomes more and more complex. Hybrid beamforming architecture provides excellent trade-off between the system performance and the complexity for the massive MIMO system. Hybrid beamforming architecture can be classified as fully-connected (FC) and sub-connected (SC) architecture. Existing studies on the system performance comparison of the two architectures are limited. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the FC and SC architecture in the multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) system. We derive the closed-form sum rate of two architectures under the same total transmission power constraint. From the results, we conclude that the system performance of FC architecture is always better than that of SC architecture. When the number of users is small or the signal noise ratio (SNR) is low, the performance difference between the FC and SC architecture is small. Our analysis can serve as a guideline of choosing hybrid beamforming architectures.