Energy Efficiency Maximization in Millimeter Wave Hybrid MIMO Systems for 5G and Beyond

At millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies, the higher cost and power consumption of hardware components in multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems do not allow beamforming entirely at the baseband with a separate radio frequency (RF) chain for each antenna. In such scenarios, to enable spatial multiplexing, hybrid beamforming, which uses phase shifters to connect a fewer number of RF chains to a large number of antennas is a cost effective and energy-saving alternative. This paper describes our research on fully adaptive transceivers that adapt their behaviour on a frame-by-frame basis, so that a mmWave hybrid MIMO system always operates in the most energy efficient manner. Exhaustive search based brute force approach is computationally intensive, so we study fractional programming as a low-cost alternative to solve the problem which maximizes energy efficiency. The performance results indicate that the resulting mmWave hybrid MIMO transceiver achieves significantly improved energy efficiency results compared to the baseline cases involving analogue-only or digital-only signal processing solutions, and shows performance trade-offs with the brute force approach.