Beam Structured Precoder for HF Skywave Massive MIMO-OFDM Communications With Channel Smoothness Constraint

In this paper, we investigate precoder design for high frequency (HF) skywave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation. We first reveal the effect of the precoder on the effective channel at receivers and formulate the precoder design for a group of subcarriers as a sum-rate maximization problem, where the delay spread of the effective channel is constrained to maintain its smoothness. Then with the beam based channel model and beam domain channel sparsity, the design of space domain precoders for a group of subcarriers are transformed into that of a space-frequency (SF) beam domain vector and the resulting space domain precoder at each subcarrier is beam structured. Efficient calculation for design and implementation of the beam structured precoder (BSP) is proposed. Moreover, effective channel estimation with the BSP is discussed. Simulation results show that the proposed BSP can enhance the effective channel estimation performance and significantly improve the system performance.