Hybrid-Precoding for mmWave Multi-User Communications in the Presence of Beam-Misalignment

In this paper, we propose the hybrid-precoding design that alleviates the performance loss caused by beam-misalignment in the mmWave multi-user communication systems. To this end, we firstly design the beam-misalignment aware fully-digital precoders for two distinct scenarios. First, for a base-station (BS) with full estimated channel-state-information (CSI), the minimum-mean-squared-error metric incorporating the 'error-statistics' of the beam-misalignment error is used to analytically derive a closed-form expression for the fully-digital precoder, which maximizes the array gain while suppressing the inter-user interference for each user-equipment (UE). Second, for a BS which can only acquire partial estimated CSI, a min-max non-convex optimization is considered to obtain the fully-digital precoder, which minimizes the maximum loss in the array gains of the expected beam-misalignment 'error-range' over the UEs while cancelling the inter-user interference. Subsequently, we propose the hybrid-precoding design that approximates the fully-digital designs based on the gradient-projection method, which is mathematically proven to converge to an approximate local solution with further reduced complexity compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, the proposed hybrid-precoding design is further extended to the wideband mmWave communication systems. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid-precoding design can effectively alleviate the performance degradation incurred by the beam-misalignment.