Dynamic Unequally Sub-Connected Hybrid Beamforming Architecture for Massive MIMO Systems

In this work, we propose a novel dynamic unequal sub-array (DUESA) architecture for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with partially connected hybrid beamforming (PC-HBF) that relaxes the antenna-allocation constraint in the conventional unequal sub-array (UESA) architecture. The proposed DUESA architecture dynamically allocates antennas to sub-arrays based on channel state information, which leads to a combinatorial problem to optimize the sum rate. The exact solution to this problem requires an exhaustive search; however, the total number of candidates to search through can be extremely large in massive MIMO systems. To address this challenge, we propose three sub-optimal algorithms. The first is a tabu search-based algorithm, which examines the neighbors of the current solution to antenna-to-sub-array allocation and moves to the best one in each iteration. The second is a sequential antenna-reallocation algorithm with reduced complexity, which updates an antenna-to-sub-array assignment in each iteration. The third algorithm, that is, greedy antenna allocation, is composed of two sub-optimal algorithms. In its first part, only a single antenna is allocated to each sub-array based on a conventional algorithm. Then, in the second part, the antennas are added sequentially to each sub-array to optimize the system sum rate. The numerical results demonstrate that the DUESA architecture achieves substantially higher total achievable rates than conventional PC-HBF schemes. Furthermore, it has approximately 10%-20% higher energy efficiency than the conventional UESA architecture.