Wideband Channel Tracking and Hybrid Precoding for mmWave MIMO Systems

A major source of difficulty when operating with large arrays at millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies is to estimate the wideband channel, since the use of hybrid architectures acts as a compression stage for the received signal. Moreover, the channel has to be tracked and the antenna arrays regularly reconfigured to obtain appropriate beamforming gains when a mobile setting is considered. In this paper, we focus on the problem of channel tracking for frequency-selective mmWave channels, and propose two novel channel tracking algorithms. One of them exploits the sparsity of the mmWave channel, while the other one leverages prior statistical information about the channel parameters. We also propose a hybrid precoder and combiner design method to increase the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) during channel tracking, such that near-optimum data rates can be obtained with low-overhead. In our numerical results, we analyze the performance of our proposed algorithms for different system parameters. Simulation results show that our proposed channel tracking algorithms are able to achieve near-optimum data rates outperforming state-of-the-art methods.