Analog Beamforming With Antenna Selection For Large-Scale Antenna Arrays

Abstract

In large-scale antenna array (LSAA) wireless communication systems employing analog beamforming architectures, the placement or selection of a subset of antennas can significantly reduce the power consumption and hardware complexity. In this work, we propose a joint design of analog beamforming with antenna selection (AS) or antenna placement (AP) for an analog beamforming system. We approach this problem from a beampattern matching perspective and formulate a sparse unit-modulus least-squares (SULS) problem, which is a nonconvex problem due to the unit-modulus and the sparsity constraints. To that end, we propose an efficient and scalable algorithm based on the majorization-minimization (MM) framework for solving the SULS problem. We show that the sequence of iterates generated by the algorithm converges to a stationary point of the problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed joint design of analog beamforming with AS outperforms conventional array architectures with fixed inter-antenna element spacing.