Grouping Method for mmWave Massive MIMO System: Exploitation of Angular Multiplexing Gain

A future millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system may serve hundreds or thousands of users at the same time; thus, research on multiple access technology is particularly important.Moreover, due to the short-wavelength nature of a mmWave, large-scale arrays are easier to implement than microwaves, while their directivity and sparseness make the physical beamforming effect of precoding more prominent.In consideration of the mmWave angle division multiple access (ADMA) system based on precoding, this paper investigates the influence of the angle distribution on system performance, which is denoted as the angular multiplexing gain.Furthermore, inspired by the above research, we transform the ADMA user grouping problem to maximize the system sum-rate into the inter-user angular spacing equalization problem.Then, the form of the optimal solution for the approximate problem is derived, and the corresponding grouping algorithm is proposed.The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than the comparison methods.Finally, a complexity analysis also shows that the proposed algorithm has extremely low complexity.