Codebook Design for Millimeter-Wave Channel Estimation with Hybrid Precoding Structure

In this paper, we study hierarchical codebook design for channel estimation in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications with a hybrid precoding structure. Due to the limited saturation power of the mmWave power amplifier, we consider the per-antenna power constraint (PAPC). We first propose a metric, termed generalized detection probability (GDP), to evaluate the quality of an arbitrary codeword. This metric not only enables an optimization approach for mmWave codebook design, but also can be used to compare the performance of two different codewords/codebooks. To the best of our knowledge, GDP is the first such metric, particularly for mmWave codebook design. We then propose a heuristic approach to design a hierarchical codebook exploiting beam widening with the multi-RF-chain sub-array (BMW-MS) technique. To obtain crucial parameters of BMW-MS, we provide two solutions, namely, a low-complexity search (LCS) solution to optimize the GDP metric and a closed-form (CF) solution to pursue a flat beam pattern. Performance comparisons show that BMW-MS/LCS and BMW-MS/CF achieve very close performances, and they outperform the existing alternatives under the PAPC.