3D Angular-Based Hybrid Precoding and User Grouping for Uniform Rectangular Arrays in Massive MU-MIMO Systems

This paper proposes a new user grouping algorithm and three-dimensional (3D) angular-based hybrid precoding (AB-HP) scheme for massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems using uniform rectangular arrays (URA). At first, the users clustered in multiple spots are efficiently grouped according to the proposed user grouping algorithm, which only utilizes the user angle-of-departure (AoD) information and does not require prior knowledge of the number of user groups. By employing the AoD support of the user groups, the RF-beamformer of AB-HP is designed to reduce the inter-group interference, the channel state information (CSI) overhead, and the number of RF chains. Then, the digital baseband precoder of AB-HP is constructed via regularized zero-forcing (RZF) using the effective channel seen from baseband to simultaneously serve the users clustered in multiple groups, by considering three approaches: joint-group-processing (JGP), per-group-processing (PGP) and common-group-processing (CGP). For each approach, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) expressions as well as their tight deterministic approximations are derived. To further reduce the number of RF chains, we also propose a new transfer block design, which reduces the number of RF chains down to the number of independent data streams without penalizing the sum-rate performance. Illustrative results reveal that the proposed AB-HP schemes with the relaxed CSI estimation overhead and reduced hardware cost/complexity can closely approach to the sum-rate performance of the single-stage fully-digital precoding (FDP). Furthermore, AB-HP has considerably higher energy efficiency performance compared to FDP due to the reduced number of RF chains. We show through simulation that the proposed AB-HP can offer significantly better performance than existing HP techniques. The computational complexity of AB-HP is also analyzed.