Hybrid Precoding Design in Millimeter Wave MIMO
Systems: An Alternating Minimization Approach
Xianghao Yu∗ , Juei-Chin Shen† , Jun Zhang∗ , and K. B. Letaief∗ , Fellow, IEEE
∗
Dept. of ECE, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
†
Mediatek Inc., Hsinchu
Email: {xyuam, eejzhang, eekhaled}@ust.hk, † jc.shen@mediatek.com
∗
Abstract—Millimeter wave (mmWave) communications holds
a promise to offer an unprecedented capacity boost for 5G
cellular networks. Due to the small wavelength of mmWave sig-
nals, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems can lever-
age large-scale antennas to combat the path loss and rain
attenuation via precoding. Different from conventional MIMO
systems, mmWave MIMO cannot realize precoding entirely at
baseband using digital precoders, as a result of the potentially
high power consumed by the signal mixers and analog-to-digital
converters (ADCs). As a cost-effective alternative, a hybrid
precoding transceiver architecture for mmWave MIMO systems
has received considerable attention. However, the optimal design
of such hybrid precoding has not been fully understood. In this
paper, an alternating minimization algorithm based on manifold
optimization is proposed to design the hybrid precoder, thereby
making it comparable in performance to the digital precoder. Nu-
merical results show that our proposed algorithm can significantly
outperform existing ones in terms of spectral efficiency and, more
importantly, it can achieve the optimal performance in certain
cases. The alternating minimization approach is also shown
to be generally applicable to precoding design with different
hybrid structures, and the corresponding comparison will show
interesting design insights for hybrid precoding.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The capacity of wireless networks has to increase exponen-
tially to meet the ever-increasing demands for high-data-rate
multimedia access. One promising way to boost the capacity is
to exploit new spectrum bands for wireless communications.
MmWave bands from 30 GHz to 300 GHz, previously only
considered in indoor and fixed outdoor scenarios [1], have
now been put forward as a prime candidate for new spectrum
in 5G cellular systems. This view is supported by recent
experiments in New York City that demonstrated the feasibility
of mmWave outdoor cellular wireless communications [2].
The small wavelength of mmWave signals enables large-scale
antenna arrays at transceivers, so that significant beamforming
gains can be obtained to combat the path loss and rain
attenuation resulted from the ten-fold increase of the carrier
frequency. Moreover, spectral efficiency can also be improved
by transmitting multiple data streams via spatial multiplexing.
For traditional MIMO systems, precoding is typically ac-
complished at the baseband through digital precoders, which
can change both the magnitude and phase of signals. However,
fully digital precoding demands RF chains, including signal
mixers and ADCs, comparable in number to antenna elements.
While the small wavelengths of mmWave frequencies facilitate
the use of a large number of antenna elements, the prohibitive
cost and power consumption of RF chains make digital pre-
coding infeasible. Given such unique constraints in mmWave
MIMO systems, a hybrid precoding structure has recently been
978-1-4799-5952-5/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
proposed, which requires only a small number of RF chains in-
terfacing between low-dimensional digital precoders and high-
dimensional analog precoders. In particular, each RF chain is
connected to all the antenna elements via phase shifters, so this
arrangement is referred to as the fully-connected structure, as
illustrated in Fig. 1.
There exist several previous studies on precoding design
for the fully-connected hybrid structure [3]. In [4], the optimal
design presented a special case, i.e., when the number of RF
chains is at least twice the number of data streams. The major
obstacle for solving the general case is to satisfy unit modulus
constraints on analog precoders. Orthogonal matching pursuit
(OMP), one of the widely used hybrid precoding algorithms
[3], overcomes this obstacle by restricting columns of the
analog precoding matrices to be the subset of predefined
candidate vectors. Though the design problem is greatly sim-
plified, imposing this extra constraint inevitably causes some
performance loss. In other words, the general design problem
of hybrid precoding has not yet been satisfactorily solved.
In this paper, we will approach the performance of the
optimal fully digital precoder by hybrid precoders without
extra restrictions. A novel alternating minimization algorithm
will be proposed, where the digital and analog parts are
separately considered per iteration. Unlike the previous result
in [3], the unit modulus constraints will be directly handled by
manifold optimization. In particular, the manifold structure of
the analog precoding pattern is exploited to efficiently identify
a near-optimal solution. Simulation results will demonstrate
significant throughput gains of the proposed algorithm over
existing ones. The proposed alternating minimization algo-
rithm will also be extended to consider a partially-connected
structure, also called as the array of subarrays structure [5], that
employs notably less phase shifters. Different from previous
investigations focusing on codebook-based precoding [6], our
study provides an effective algorithm for non-codebook-based
precoding design of this structure. Furthermore, the compar-
ison between these two structures indicates that the fully-
connected structure results in higher spectral efficiency while
the partially-connected one is more energy efficient.
The following notations are used throughout this paper. a
and A stand for a column vector and a matrix respectively;
Ai,j is the entry on the ith row and jth column of A;
The conjugate, transpose and conjugate transpose of A are
represented by A∗ , AT and AH ; det(A) and AF denote
the determinant and Frobenius norm of A; A−1 and A† are
the inverse and Moore-Penrose pseudo inverse of A; diag(A)
generates a diagonal matrix with the entries of vector a;
tr(A) and vec(A) indicate the trace and vectorization of A;
Expectation and the real part of a complex variable is noted B. Channel Model
by E[·] and [·]; ◦ and ⊗ denote the Hadamard and Kronecker
products between two matrices. Due to high free-space path losses, the mmWave propaga-
tion environment is well characterized by a clustered channel
II. S YSTEM M ODEL AND P ROBLEM F ORMULATION model, i.e., the Saleh-Valenzuela model [2]. This model depicts
the mmWave channel matrix as
A. System Model  Ncl N
Nt Nr  ray

Consider a single-user mmWave MIMO system1 as shown H= αil ar (φril , θil

r
)at (φtil , θil
t H
) , (3)
in Fig. 1, where Ns data streams are sent and collected by Ncl Nray i=1
l=1
Nt transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas. The limitation
on the amount of RF chains is given by Ns ≤ NRF t
≤ Nt where Ncl and Nray represent the number of clusters and
r t
and Ns ≤ NRF ≤ Nr , where NRF and NRF denote the t the number of rays in each cluster, and αil denotes the gain
numbers of RF chains facilitated at the transmitter and receiver, of the lth ray in the ith propagation cluster. We assume
2
that α are i.i.d. and follow the distribution CN (0, σα,i ) and
respectively. Ncl il 2
i=1 σα,i = γ, which is the normalization factor to satisfy
Analog RF Precoder 2
E HF = Nt Nr . In addition, ar (φril , θil r
) and at (φtil , θil
t
)
represent the receive and transmit array response vectors,
r t r t
where θil (θil ) and θil (θil ) stand for azimuth and elevation
RF Chain angles of arrival and departure, respectively. In this paper,
Digital we consider
√ √ the uniform square planar array (USPA) with
Baseband Nx × Nx (x ∈ {t, r}) antenna elements. Therefore, the
Precoder ith element of array response vector can be written as
 
1 2π x x x
ax (φ, θ)i = √ exp j d(p sin φ sin θ + q cos θ ) ,
RF Chain Nx λ
(4)
where d and λ are√the antenna spacing√and the signal wave-
length, 0 ≤ p < Nx and 0 ≤ q < Nx are the antenna
Fig. 1. The fully-connected hybrid precoding structure. indices in the 2D plane. While this channel model will be
used in simulations, our precoder design is applicable to more
The transmitted signal can be written as x = FRF FBB s, general models.
where s is the Ns × 1 symbol vector such that E ssH =
1 t
Ns INs . The hybrid precoder consists of an NRF × Ns dig-
C. Problem Formulation
t
ital baseband precoder FBB and an Nt × NRF analog RF As shown in [3], the design of precoders and decoders
precoder FRF . The transmit power constraint is given by can be separated into two sub-problems, i.e., the precoding
2
FRF FBB F = Ns . For simplicity, we consider a block-fading and decoding problems. They have similar mathematical for-
propagation channel and the received signal after combining mulations except that there is an extra power constraint in the
processing is former. Therefore, we will mainly focus on the precoder design
√ H H H H in the remaining part of this paper. The corresponding problem
y = ρWBB WRF HFRF FBB s + WBB WRF n, (1)
formulation is given by
where ρ stands for the average received power, H is the chan-
nel matrix, WBB is the NRF r
× Ns digital baseband decoder, minimize Fopt − FRF FBB F
r FRF ,FBB
WRF is the Nr × NRF analog RF decoder at the receiver and  (5)
n is the noise vector of independent and identically distributed |(FRF )i,j | = 1, ∀i, j,
subject to 2
(i.i.d.) CN (0, σn2 ) elements. The achievable spectral efficiency FRF FBB F = Ns ,
when transmitted symbols follow a Gaussian distribution can
be expressed as where Fopt stands for the optimal fully digital precoder, while
 FRF and FBB are the analog and digital precoders to be
ρ −1 H H optimized.
R = log det INs + Σ WBB WRF HFRF FBB
Ns
 (2) It has been shown in [3] that minimizing the objective func-
×FH F H
H H
W W , tion in (5) leads to the maximization of spectral efficiency. In
BB RF RF BB
addition, the matrix Fopt is comprised of the first Ns columns
of V, which is a unitary matrix derived from the channel’s
where Σ = σn2 WBB H
WRFH
WRF WBB is the noise covariance
singular value decomposition (SVD), i.e., H = UΣVH .
matrix. Furthermore, the analog precoders are implemented
with phase shifters, which can only adjust the phases of the sig-
nals. Thus all the entries of FRF and WRF should satisfy the III. H YBRID P RECODING D ESIGN T HROUGH
unit modulus constraint, namely |(FRF )i,j | = |(WRF )i,j | = 1. A LTERNATING M INIMIZATION
For the fully-connected structure in Fig. 1, the output signal of Alternating minimization, which reduces the objective
each RF chain is sent to all the antennas through phase shifters, function with respect to different subsets of variables in each
while a different structure will be discussed in Section IV. alternating step, has been successfully applied to many applica-
1 The receiver side is omitted due to space limitation. More details can be tions such as matrix completion, phase retrieval and dictionary
found in [3]. learning [7]. Here we take this approach to solve problem (5),
by alternating between locating the best FBB and the best FRF .
The main difficulty will be in the analog precoder design, for
which we will propose a manifold optimization algorithm.
A. Digital Baseband Precoder Design
To design the digital precoder FBB , we fix the analog
precoder FRF and restate problem (5) as
minimize Fopt − FRF FBB F ,
FBB
which has a well-known least squares solution
FBB = F†RF Fopt .
Note that the power constraint in (5), temporarily removed,
will be dealt with in Section III-C. Despite this, (7) has already
offered a global optimal solution to the counterpart design
problem at the receiver side.
B. Analog RF Precoder Design via Manifold Optimization
In the next alternating step, regarding FBB as fixed, we
seek an analog precoder which optimizes the following prob-
lem2 :
2
minimize Fopt − FRF FBB F
FRF (8)
subject to |(FRF )i,j | = 1, ∀i, j.
The main obstacle of is the unit modulus constraints, i.e.,
|(FRF )i,j | = 1, which are intrinsically non-convex. To the
best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no general approach to
solve (8) optimally, which is the major difficulty in alternating
minimization.
It has been pointed out in [3] that the unit modulus
constraints make the original problem (5) mathematically
intractable. However, we will show that the sub-problem
(8) can be effectively solved by manifold minimization, as
the unit modulus constraints define a Riemannian manifold.
More importantly, the minimization over this manifold is
locally analogous to that over a Euclidean space with smooth
constraints. Therefore, a well-developed conjugate gradient
algorithm on Euclidean spaces can have its counterpart on
the specified Riemannian manifold. Manifold optimization has
recently been applied for topological interference management
in wireless networks [8]. In the following, we will briefly
introduce the main idea.
Note that the vector x = vec(FRF ) forms a complex circle
manifold Mm = {x ∈ Cm : |x1 | = |x2 | = · · · = |xm | = 1},
t
where m = Nt NRF . Therefore, the search space of the
optimization problem (8) is over a product of m circles in the
complex plane, which is a Riemannian submanifold of Cm
with the product geometry. Please refer to [9] for background
on Riemannian manifold and manifold optimization.
For a given point x on the manifold Mm , the directions
it can move along are characterized by the tangent vectors,
ensuring the destination is also on the manifold. All the tangent
vectors construct a tangent space at the point x ∈ Mm , which
can be represented by
Tx Mm = {y ∈ Cm :  {y ◦ x∗ } = 0m } .
2 The square of the Frobenius norm makes the objective function smooth,
and will not affect the solution.
Among all the tangent vectors, similar to the Euclidean
space, one of them related to the negative Riemannian gradient
represents the direction of the greatest decrease of a function.
Because the complex circle manifold Mm is a Riemannian
submanifold of Cm , the Riemannian gradient at x is a tangent
vector gradf (x) given by the orthogonal projection of the
Euclidean gradient ∇f (x) onto the tangent space Tx Mm :
gradf (x) = Projx ∇f (x)
(10)
(6) = ∇f (x) − {diag [∇f (x) ◦ x∗ ]}x,
where the Euclidean gradient of the cost function in (8) is
 
(7) ∇f (x) = −2(F∗BB ⊗ INt ) vec(Fopt ) − (FTBB ⊗ INt )x .
(11)
Retraction is another key factor in manifold optimization,
which maps a vector from the tangent space onto the mani-
fold itself, determining the destination when moving along a
tangent vector. The retraction of a tangent vector αd at point
x ∈ Mm can be stated as
Retrx :Tx Mm → Mm :
(x + αd)i (12)
αd → Retrx (αd) = vec .
|(x + αd)i |
Equipped with the tangent space, Riemannian gradient and
retraction of the complex circle manifold Mm , a line search
based conjugate gradient method [10], which is a classical
algorithm in Euclidean space, can be developed to design the
analog precoder as shown in Algorithm 1.
Algorithm 1 Conjugate Gradient Algorithm for Analog Pre-
coder Design Based on Manifold Optimization
Require: Fopt , FBB , x0 ∈ Mm
1: d0 = −gradf (x0 ) and k = 0;
2: repeat
3: Choose Armijo backtracking line search step size αk ;
4: Find the next point xk+1 using retraction in (12):
xk+1 = Retrxk (αk dk );
5: Determine Riemannian gradient gk+1 = gradf (xk+1 )
according to (10) and (11);
6: Calculate the vector transports gk+ and d+
k of gradient
gk and conjugate direction dk from xk to xk+1 ;
7: Choose Polak-Ribiere parameter βk+1 ;
8: Compute conjugate direction dk+1 = −gk+1 +βk+1 d+ k;
9: k ← k + 1;
10: until |gradf (xk+1 )| ≤ .
Algorithm 1 utilizes the well-known Armijo backtracking
line search step and Polak-Ribiere parameter to guarantee the
objective function to be non-increasing in each iteration. In ad-
dition, since Steps 7 and 8 involve the operations between two
vectors in different tangent spaces Txk Mm and Txk+1 Mm ,
which can not be combined directly, a mapping between two
tangent vectors in different tangent spaces called transport is
introduced. The transport of a tangent vector d from xk to
xk+1 can be specified as
(9) Transpxk →xk+1 :Txk Mm → Txk+1 Mm :
  (13)
d → d − {diag d ◦ x∗k+1 }xk+1 ,
which is accomplished in Step 6.
C. Hybrid Precoder Design IV. A LTERNATING M INIMIZATION FOR THE
PARTIALLY- CONNECTED STRUCTURE
The hybrid precoder design via alternating minimization
is described in Algorithm 2 by solving problems (6) and (8) Besides the fully-connected hybrid precoding structure, an-
iteratively. To reduce the complexity of the algorithm and other structure with relatively simple hardware implementation
called the partially-connected structure has also been proposed
satisfy the power constraint in (5), we√ normalize FBB by
having it multiplied by a factor of FRF FNBB
s recently [5], [6], as illustrated in Fig. 2. In the partially-
F at Step 7. The connected structure, each RF chain is just connected with
following lemma help reveal the effect of this normalization. t
Nt /NRF antennas, which reduces the hardware complexity in
the RF domain. In the partially-connected structure, the analog
Algorithm 2 Hybrid Precoder Design through Alternating precoder FRF belongs to a set of block diagonal matrices ARF ,
Minimization t
where each block is an Nt /NRF dimension vector with unit
Require: Fopt modulus elements.
(0) (0) (0)†
1: Construct FRF with random phases, FBB = FRF Fopt Analog RF Precoder
and k = 0;
2: repeat
(k+1) (k)
3: Optimize FRF using Algorithm 1 when FBB is fixed;
(k+1) (k+1) (k+1)† RF Chain
4: Fix FRF , and FBB = FRF Fopt ;
5: k ← k + 1; Digital
(k+1) (k) (k+1) (k+1)
6: until Fopt −FRF FBB 2F −Fopt −FRF FBB 2F ≤ Baseband
; Precoder
7: For the digital
√ precoder at the transmit end, normalize
FBB = FRF FNBB s
 FBB . RF Chain
F

Lemma 1. If the Euclidean distance before normalization is

Fig. 2. The partially-connected hybrid precoding structure.
F
 opt − FRF FBB F ≤ δ, then after normalization we have
 
Fopt − FRF FBB  ≤ 2δ. Alternating minimization can also be utilized under this
F
structure and the design procedure is presented below. More
√ importantly, thanks to the characteristic of FRF , the optimality
Proof: Define the normalization factor FRF FNBB
s
F =
1
λ can be guaranteed for the digital and analog precoders respec-
and thus FRF FBB F = λ Fopt F . By norm inequality, tively for this partially-connected structure.

Fopt − FRF FBB F ≥ | Fopt F − FRF FBB F | A. Analog RF Precoder Design

(14)
= |1 − λ| Fopt F , The problem formulation of the analog precoder is given
1
as 2
which is equivalent to Fopt F ≤ |λ−1| δ. When λ = 1, minimize Fopt − FRF FBB F
FRF (16)
  subject to FRF ∈ ARF .
 
Fopt − FRF FBB 
 F  Due to special structure of the constraint on FRF , in the
 1  product FRF FBB , each nonzero element of FRF is multiplied
= F
 opt − F F
RF BB + (1 − )F F
RF BB 

λ F
by a corresponding row extracted from FBB . This special
(15) characteristic simplifies the analog precoder design and there
1
≤ Fopt − FRF FBB F + (1 − ) FRF FBB F exists a closed-form expression for nonzero elements in FRF
λ
λ−1 H
≤ δ + (λ − 1) Fopt F ≤ δ + δ ≤ 2δ. (FRF )i,j = arg{(Fopt )i,: (FBB )j,: },
 t 
|λ − 1| N (17)
1 ≤ i ≤ Nt , j = i RF .
Nt

Lemma 1 shows that as long as we can make the Euclidean B. Digital Baseband Precoder Design
distance between the optimal digital precoder and the hybrid Since there is no power constraint with respect to the
precoder sufficiently small without considering the power decoder design at receiver, similar to the design in Section
constraint in (5), the normalization step will also achieve a III-A, the global optimal solution of the digital decoder can be
small distance to the optimal digital precoder. determined by (7). On the other hand, also due to the block
Since the objective function in problem (5) is minimized diagonal and unit modulus structures, the power constraint in
at Steps 3 and 4, each iteration will never increase it. Also, (5) at the transmit side can be recast as the following problem
2
the objective function is nonnegative. These two properties minimize Fopt − FRF FBB F
together guarantee that our algorithm converges to a feasible FBB
solution. The optimality of alternating minimization algorithms t
NRF Ns (18)
2
for non-convex problems is still an open problem [11]. subject to FBB F = .
Nt
Basically, problem (18) is a non-convex quadratic constraint angles of departure and arrival (AoDs and AoAs) follow the
quadratic programming (QCQP) problem, which can be refor- Laplacian distribution with uniformly distributed mean angles
mulated as a homogeneous QCQP problem: and angular spread of 7.5 degrees. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
is defined as σρ2 . The antenna elements in USPA are separated
minimize tr(CY) n
Y∈Hn
⎧ by a half wavelength distance and all simulation results are
⎪ N t Ns averaged over 1000 channel realizations.
⎨tr(A1 Y) = RF Nt , (19)
subject to tr(A2 Y) = 1,
⎪
⎩Y  0, rank(Y) = 1,
14
Digital Optimal
Proposed Algorithm in Section III
12 OMP Algorithm [3]
with Hn being the set of n = NRFt
Ns + 1 dimension complex Beam Steering [14]

Spectral Efficiency (bits/s/Hz)

T
Hermitian matrices. In addition, y = [ vec(FBB ) t ] with 10
H
an auxiliary variable t, Y = yy , f = vec(Fopt ) and
8
In−1 0 0n−1 0
A1 = , A2 = ,
0 0 0 1 6

(INs ⊗ FRF )H (INs ⊗ FRF ) −(INs ⊗ FRF )H f 4

C= .
−f H (INs ⊗ FRF ) vec(Fopt )H f
2

In fact, the most difficult part in problem (19) is the

rank constraint, which is non-convex with respect to Y. Thus 0
-30 -25 -20 -15 -10 -5 0
we may drop it to obtain a relaxed version of (19), i.e., a SNR (dB)
semidefinite relaxation (SDR) problem. It turns out that the
SDR is tight when the number of constraints is less than Fig. 3. Spectral efficiency achieved by different precoding algorithms when
t
NRF r = 2 for fully-connected structure.
= NRF
three for a complex-valued homogeneous QCQP problem [12].
Consequently, problem (19) without the rank-one constraint
reduces into a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem and
can be solved by standard convex optimization algorithms, First we investigated the spectral efficiency under the fully-
from which we can obtain the optimal solution of (18). connected structure when the number of RF chains is equal to
t r
that of data streams NRF = NRF = Ns = 2. This is the worst
C. Comparison Between Two Hybrid Precoding Structures case since RF chains can not be less under the assumption in
t r
Section II-A that Ns ≤ NRF ≤ Nt and Ns ≤ NRF ≤ Nr .
The main difference between the two hybrid precoding In this case, as shown in Fig. 3, the existing OMP and beam
structures considered in this paper is the number of phase steering algorithms developed in [3], [14] achieve significantly
shifters NPS in use for given numbers of data streams, RF lower spectral efficiency than the optimal digital precoding at
chains, and antennas. higher SNRs. On the contrary, our proposed alternating mini-
mization algorithm achieves near-optimal performance over the
For spectral efficiency, the fully-connected structure pro- whole SNR range in consideration. This means the proposed
vides more design degrees of freedom (DoFs) in the RF algorithm can more accurately approximate the optimal digital
domain and thus outperforms the partially-connected one. precoder than existing algorithms.
However, when taking power consumption into consideration,
t r
it is intriguing to know which structure has better energy It has been shown that when NRF ≥ 2Ns and NRF ≥ 2Ns ,
efficiency. Energy efficiency is defined as the ratio between there exists a closed-form solution to the design problem of
spectral efficiency and total power consumption [13] the fully-connected hybrid precoding, which leads to the same
R spectral efficiency provided by the optimal digital precod-
E= t P , (20) ing [4]. Thus it is interesting to examine if our proposed
Pcommon + NRF RF + NPS (PPS + PPA ) algorithm can achieve the comparable performance in this
where the unit of E is bits/Hz/J, Pcommon is the common special case. Fig. 4 compares the performance of different
power of the transmitter, and PRF , PPS and PPA are the precoding schemes for different NRF . We see that the proposed
powers of each RF chain, phase shifter and power amplifier. algorithm for the fully-connected structure starts to coincide
t r
The number of phase shifters NPS is equal to Nt NRFt
for the with the optimal digital precoding when NRF = NRF ≥
t
fully-connected structure and NPS equals Nt for the partially- 4. This result demonstrates that when NRF ≥ 2Ns and
r
connected one. The numerical comparison will be provided in NRF ≥ 2Ns , our proposed algorithm can actually achieve
the next section. the optimal spectral efficiency, which can not be achieved by
the OMP algorithm. Furthermore, the comparison between two
V. S IMULATION R ESULTS hybrid precoding structures shows that the partially-connected
structure, using less phase shifters, does entail some non-
In this section, we numerically evaluate the performance negligible performance loss when compared with the fully-
of our proposed algorithms. Assume that two data streams are connected structure. However, the spectral efficiency achieved
sent from a transmitter with Nt = 64 to a receiver with Nr =16, by this structure is still higher than that achieved by the fully-
while both are equipped with USPA. The channel parameters connected structure using the beam steering approach. For the
t
are given by Ncl = 8 clusters, Nray = 10 rays and the average partially-connected structure, we choose NRF ∈ {2, 4, 8} to
2 t
power of each cluster is σα,i = 1. The azimuth and elevation guarantee that Nt /NRF is an integer.
 14
VI. C ONCLUSION
13.5
Fully-connected structure
This paper proposed an alternating minimization approach
13
for the hybrid precoding design in mmWave MIMO systems.
Spectral Efficiency (bits/s/Hz)

12.5 By alternating between the digital baseband precoder design

Partially-connected structure
12 and the analog RF precoder design, much higher spectral
efficiency is achieved compared to existing methods. One
11.5
particular contribution is the identification of the manifold
11
Digital Optimal
structure in the analog precoder, and thus powerful manifold
10.5
Alternating Minimization in Section III optimization can be applied. Numerical results have demon-
OMP Algorithm [3]
Alternating Minimization in Section IV strated that the proposed algorithm performs favorably in com-
10
Beam Steering [14] parison to several existing algorithms with regard to spectral
9.5 efficiency. When it comes to the partially-connected structure,
9 the precoder design solution is obtained by using the SDR-
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 enabled alternating minimization algorithm. It turns out that
NRF
the fully-connected structure has a higher spectral efficiency
while the partially-connected structure, taking advantage of
Fig. 4. Spectral efficiency achieved by different precoding algorithms given
t
NRF r =N
= NRF RF and SNR = 0dB.
its low-complexity hardware architecture, achieves a higher
energy efficiency. The proposed approach can be extended to
0.3 other hybrid precoder design problems in mmWave MIMO
systems. Meanwhile, the computation efficiency will need to
be improved to make it practical.
0.25 Partially-connected
Energy Efficiency (bits/Hz/J)

0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
2 3 4 5
NtRF
Fig. 5. Energy efficiency of fully-connected and partially-connected structures
when SNR = −5dB.
Fig. 5 illustrates the achievable energy efficiency of differ-
ent hybrid precoding structures. The simulation parameters are
set as follows: Pcommon = 10 W, PRF = 100 mW, PPS = 10
mW and PPA = 300 mW [2]. Since the number of phase
t Tahoe, Dec. 2013, pp. 2796–2804.
shifters scales linearly with NRF and Nt in the fully-connected
structure, the power consumption will increase substantially
t riemannian pursuit for topological interference management,” in Proc.
when increasing NRF . As shown in Fig. 4, however, the
spectral efficiency achieved by the proposed algorithm in
Section III is sufficiently close or exactly equal to the optimal
digital one. Based on these two facts, the power consumption
grows much faster than the spectral efficiency, which gives rise
to the dramatic decrease of the energy efficiency.
For the partially-connected structure, as the number of
t
phase shifters is independent of NRF , the dominant part
of total power consumption remains almost unchanged over
the investigated range of RF chain numbers. Meanwhile, the
spectral efficiency will gradually approach the optimal digital
t Mag., vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 20–34, May 2010.
precoder when increasing NRF . The improvement of the spec-
tral efficiency and the almost unchanged power consumption
t
together account for the rise in energy efficiency when NRF
goes up in the partially-connected structure. Thus, we may
conclude that the fully-connected structure is superior in terms
of spectral efficiency while the partially-connected structure
has an advantage of being more energy efficient.
Fully-connected
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