Analog Beamforming in MIMO Communications With Phase Shift Networks and Online Channel Estimation

In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the use of many radio frequency (RF) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) chains at the receiver is costly. Analog beamformers operating in the RF domain can reduce the number of antenna signals to a feasible number of baseband channels. Subsequently, digital beamforming is used to capture the desired user signal. In this paper, we consider the design of the analog and digital beamforming coefficients, for the case of narrowband signals. We aim to cancel interfering signals in the analog domain, thus minimizing the required ADC resolution. For a given resolution, we will propose the optimal analog beamformer to minimize the mean squared error between the desired user and its receiver estimate. Practical analog beamformers employ only a quantized number of phase shifts. For this case, we propose a design technique to successively approximate the desired overall beamformer by a linear combination of implementable analog beamformers. Finally, an online channel estimation technique is introduced to estimate the required statistics of the wireless channel on which the optimal beamformers are based.