Multiuser Millimeter Wave Communications With Nonorthogonal Beams

作者:Xue, Qing; Fang, Xuming*; Xiao, Ming; Yan, Li
来源:IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 2017, 66(7): 5675-5688.
DOI:10.1109/TVT.2016.2617083

摘要

Recently, millimeter-wave (mmWave) and even terahertz wireless (with higher frequency) networks have attracted significant research interests as alternatives to support the formidable growth of wireless communication services. Normally, directional beamforming (BF) is shown as a promising technique to compensate its high path loss. We focus on mmWave communications and assume that both mmWave base stations (MBSs) and user equipments (UEs) can support directional BF. As mmWave spectrum has short wavelength, massive antenna arrays can be deployed at MBSs to form multiple directional beams through BF training. Then, an MBS can transmit simultaneously to multiple UEs (SUEs) with different beams in the networks. However, the beams that serve different SUEs may transmit (almost) in the same path, especially when SUEs are distributed densely. Thus, they are not in perfect orthogonal beams. Due to the leakage of transmission power, the interference among these beams may be severe. To address this problem, typically the MBS could serve these SUEs in time division multiplex. This will degrade the spectral efficiency. In this context, we investigate the effect of nonorthogonal beam interference and then propose two novel solutions (i.e., dynamic beam switching and static beam selection) to coordinate the transmitting beams effectively. Then, an improved downlink multiuser simultaneous transmission scheme is introduced. In the scheme, an MBS can serve multiple SUEs simultaneously with multiple orthogonal and/or nonorthogonal beams to guarantee SUEs' Quality of Service. The theoretical and numerical results have shown that our scheme can largely improve the performance of the achievable rate and, meanwhile, can serve lots of SUEs simultaneously.