Hybrid Beamforming for Terahertz MIMO-OFDM Systems Over Frequency Selective Fading

We propose novel hybrid beamforming schemes for the terahertz (THz) wireless system where a multi-antenna base station (BS) communicates with a multi-antenna user over frequency selective channels. Here, we assume that the BS employs sub-connected hybrid beamforming, due to its low complexity, and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to deliver ultra high data rate. First, we build a three-dimensional wideband THz channel model by incorporating the joint effect of molecular absorption, high reflection loss, and multipath fading, and consider the carrier frequency offset in OFDM. With this model, we propose a two-stage hybrid beamforming scheme which includes a normalized beamsteering codebook searching algorithm for analog beamforming and a regularized channel inversion method for digital beamforming. We then propose a novel wideband hybrid beamforming scheme with two digital beamformers. In this scheme, an additional digital beamformer is developed to compensate for the performance loss caused by the difference among subcarriers and hardware constraints. Furthermore, we consider imperfect channel state information (CSI) and propose a probabilistic robust hybrid beamforming scheme to combat channel estimation errors. Numerical results demonstrate the benefits of our proposed schemes for the sake of practical implementation, especially considering its high spectral efficiency, low complexity, and robustness against imperfect CSI.