Energy-Efficient Hybrid Symbol-Level Precoding via Phase Shifter Selection in mmWave MU-MIMO Systems

We address the symbol-level precoding design problem for the downlink of a multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output wireless system. We consider a hybrid analog-digital architecture with phase shifter selection where a small-sized baseband precoder is followed by two successive networks of analog on-off switches and variable phase shifters according to a fully-connected structure. We jointly optimize the digital baseband precoder and the states of the switching network on a symbol-level basis, i.e., by exploiting both the channel state information (CSI) and the instantaneous data symbols, while the phase-shifting network is designed only based on the CSI. Our approach to this joint optimization is to minimize the Euclidean distance between the optimal fully-digital and the hybrid symbol-level precoders. It is shown via numerical results that using the proposed approach, up to 50 percent of the phase shifters can be switched off on average, allowing for reductions in the power consumption of the phase-shifting network. Adopting appropriate power consumption models for the analog precoder, our energy efficiency analysis further shows that this power reduction can substantially improve the energy efficiency of the hybrid precoding compared to the fully-digital and the state-of-the-art schemes.