Hybrid combiner design for downlink massive MIMO systems

We consider a hybrid combiner design for downlink massive multiple‐input multiple‐output systems when there is residual inter‐user interference and each user is equipped with a limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains (less than the number of receive antennas). We propose a hybrid combiner that minimizes the mean‐squared error (MSE) between the information symbols and the ones estimated with a constant amplitude constraint on the RF combiner. In the proposed scheme, an iterative alternating optimization method is utilized. At each iteration, one of the analog RF and digital baseband combining matrices is updated to minimize the MSE by fixing the other matrix without considering the constant amplitude constraint. Then, the other matrix is updated by changing the roles of the two matrices. Each element in the RF combining matrix is obtained from the phase component of the solution matrix of the optimization problem for the RF combining matrix. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better than conventional matrix‐decomposition schemes.