Hybrid beam-forming and beam-switching for OFDM based wireless personal area networks

In this paper, we propose a hybrid beam-forming and beam-switching technique for OFDM based wireless personal area networks (WPAN). In order to compromise between performance and computational cost and overheads for the channel side information feedback, the proposed system employs hybrid beam-forming and beam-switching, where the block beam-switching using a predefined beam codebook is used at the transmitter while the optimum per-subcarrier beam-forming is used at the receiver. To verify the performance of the proposed scheme, the effective SNR gain over the single antenna transmission system is investigated along with the spectral efficiency bound for some of the channels developed by the IEEE 802.15.3c task group. For comparison, the performance of the optimum per-subcarrier beam-forming and the block beam-switching are also examined.