Beamforming via Kronecker Decomposition for Interference Cancellation in the Analog Domain

The integration of two complementary technologies, millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), will play a key role in enabling gigabit access in 5G systems. However, implementing mmWave massive MIMO using the traditional fully digital architecture will lead to prohibitive hardware complexity as it requires a massive number of RF chains matching antennas in number. To address this issue, the hybrid beamforming architecture has been recently proposed for efficient implementation of mmWave massive MIMO. Specifically, large-scale MIMO beamforming is implemented in the analog domain, called analog beamforming, that exploits the sparsity in mmWave channels for dramatic dimension reduction for digital MIMO signal processing. The typical phase-array implementation of analog beamforming introduces the uni-modulus constraints on the beamforming coefficients and renders the classic MIMO techniques unsuitable. This motivates the novel design framework, called Kronecker analog beamforming, proposed in this paper for multi-cell multiuser massive MIMO systems over mmWave channels characterized by sparse propagation paths. The framework relies on the decomposition of analog beamforming vectors and path observation vectors into Kronecker products of factor vectors with uni-modulus elements. Exploiting the properties of Kronecker product, different factors of the analog beamformer are designed for either nulling interference paths or coherently combining data paths. Thereby, Kronecker analog beamforming achieves interference nulling and signal enhancement both in the analog domain as well as dimension reduction for digital beamforming.