Constructing Receiver Signal Points using Constrained Massive MIMO Arrays

A low cost solution for constructing receiver signal points is investigated that combines a large number of constrained radio frequency (RF) frontends with a limited number of full RF chains. The constrained RF front ends have low cost and are limited to on/off switching of antenna elements and a small number of phases. Severe degradations are typically observed for multi-user MIMO for these simple on/off antenna arrays. A few full RF frontends are shown to compensate for the signal errors of the high number of constrained RF frontends for various scenarios. An algorithm for such a hybrid RF (HRF) system is developed that achieves performance close to that of exhaustive search with respect to the mean square error of the constructed receiver signals for Rayleigh fading and the WINNER 2 Urban Macro channel model.