Turbo-HB: A Sub-Millisecond Hybrid Beamforming Design for 5G mmWave Systems
Yongce Chen, Yan Huang, Chengzhang Li, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou
Abstract
Hybrid beamforming (HB) architecture has been widely considered for 5G mmWave systems. It reduces hardware complexity by allowing the number of RF chains to be far fewer than the number of antennas. A major practical challenge for HB is to obtain a beamforming solution in real-time. In 5G NR, new frame structures with short TTIs are employed to support mmWave communications. Under such frame structures, it is necessary to obtain a beamforming solution with a time resolution varying from 1 ms to 125 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> s – an extremely stringent time requirement considering the complexity involved in HB. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of <i>Turbo-HB</i> – a novel beamforming design under the HB architecture that is capable of offering the beamforming matrices in less than 500 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> s. The key ideas of Turbo-HB include: (i) reducing the complexity of computation-intensive SVD operations by exploiting channel sparsity at mmWave frequencies, and (ii) achieving large-scale parallel computation with minimal memory access. We implement Turbo-HB on an off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU and conduct extensive experiments. Our experimental results demonstrate that Turbo-HB can obtain a beamforming solution in 500 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> s for up to 100 RBs and 10 MU-MIMO users on each RB while offering competitive throughput performance compared to state-of-the-art (non-real-time) algorithms.