Power-Efficient Beam Designs for Millimeter Wave Communication Systems

The use of the millimeter wave (mmwave) spectrum for next generation mobile communication systems has gained significant attention recently. Large antenna arrays along with beamforming techniques are required to combat the large path-loss at mmwave frequencies. However, the existing beam designs often cause a large peak to average power ratio, and thus require power-inefficient power amplifiers (PAs). In this paper, we propose power-efficient beam design methods that facilitate the use of power-efficient PAs. Specifically, we design digital and hybrid analog-digital mmwave beams that possess a per-antenna constant envelope (PACE) and thus are highly power-efficient. Meanwhile, we also minimize the ripples in the mainlobe and sidelobe of the beams and consider both infinite and finite resolution phase shifters. To this end, we first propose an efficient feasible point search method to provide a feasible solution for the considered difficult beam design problem. Then, a novel hybrid analog-digital mapping algorithm is developed to map a designed digital beam to a hybrid analog-digital beam. To achieve better performance, we propose an improved hybrid analog-digital beam design method employing further optimization based on the feasible point. The proposed method is applicable to both infinite-resolution and finite-resolution phase shifters. Comprehensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed beam designs.