Parallel beam acquisition for multiuser millimeter wave communication systems with analog beamforming

This paper considers multiuser millimeter wave (mmWave) MIMO communication systems where both the base station (BS) and the user equipments (UEs) use analog beamforming (BF). We propose a beam acquisition approach to find the best directions for the narrow beams, required to achieve BS-UE links above a minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold. The multiple UEs first select their beams simultaneously, based on signals transmitted from the BS on wide training beams. The BS then switches to a beam acquisition mode in order to select the best beam direction for each UE, based on training signals the UEs send on the uplink. We propose a novel parallel beam acquisition scheme for this uplink phase. We also propose a user rejection policy, in which weak UEs that do not satisfy a target SNR threshold, equivalent to a certain bit error rate, are rejected. To do so, we derive the posterior probability that a BS beam has a resultant SNR below the target SNR threshold. We also propose a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) to reduce the computational burden. We derive closed-form error probability expressions for the proposed GLRT approach, and examine the trade-off between the beam acquisition time and accuracy in selecting the beams. We show that the beam acquisition time of our proposed approach is as low as 3% of existing approaches.