Fairness-Oriented Hybrid Precoding for Massive MIMO Maritime Downlink Systems with Large-Scale CSIT

Different from conventional cellular networks, a maritime communication base station (BS) has to cover a much wider area due to the limitation of available BS sites. Accordingly the performance of users far away from the BS is poor in general. This renders the fairness among users a challenging issue for maritime communications. In this paper, we consider a practical massive MIMO maritime BS with hybrid digital and analog precoding. Only the large-scale channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is considered so as to reduce the implementation complexity and overhead of the system. On this basis, we address the problem of fairness-oriented precoding design. A max-min optimization problem is formulated and solved in an iterative way. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs much better than conventional hybrid precoding algorithms in terms of minimum achievable rate of all the users, for the typical three-ray maritime channel model.