Hybrid Beamforming With a Reduced Number of Phase Shifters for Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, two novel hybrid beamforming methods are proposed to reduce the cost and power consumption of hybrid beamformers with a subconnected phase shifter network structure in massive multiple-input multiple-output systems. This is achieved by replacing some of the phase shifters with switches, which, in general, are cheaper and have lower power consumption compared to phase shifters. The proposed methods and the closed-form expressions of their performance are derived according to the properties of the elements of the singular vectors of the channel matrix. In the first approach, it is shown that by combining the subconnected phase shifter network with a fully connected switch architecture, the number of the phase shifters can be reduced up to 50%, while the spectral efficiency is preserved. Then, in order to simplify the structure of the switch network, the fully connected switches are replaced by a subconnected switch network, e.g., binary switches. The analytical and simulation results indicate that just by using 25% of phase shifters, 90% spectral efficiency can be achieved. Finally, simulation results indicate that a similar behavior is observed when the wireless channel is considered to be sparse or correlated.