Hardware-friendly two-stage spatial equalization for all-digital mm-wave massive MU-MIMO

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Next generation wireless communication systems are expected to combine millimeter-wave communication with massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output technology. All-digital base-station implementations for such systems need to process high-dimensional data at extremely high rates, which results in excessively high power consumption. In this paper, we propose two-stage spatial equalizers that first reduce the problem dimension by means of a hardware-friendly, low-resolution linear transform followed by spatial equalization on a lower-dimensional signal. We consider adaptive and non-adaptive dimensionality reduction strategies and demonstrate that the proposed two-stage spatial equalizers are able to approach the performance of conventional linear spatial equalizers that directly operate on high-dimensional data, while offering the potential to reduce the power consumption of spatial equalization.