Blockage-Resilient Hybrid Transceiver Optimization for mmWave Communications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) signals are sensitive to blockages in wireless channels. Traditional mmWave transceiver designs intend to harvest both beamsteering and spatial multiplexing gains, but without considering the potential change in the channel state incurred by sudden blockages. In this paper, we propose a blockage-resilient hybrid transceiver design for supporting robust data transmissions in the face of dynamic blockages. Upon exploiting the spatial structure of mmWave channels, we formulate a weighted spectral efficiency maximization problem by utilizing the statistical information concerning the potential future blockages of different path clusters, which uniquely distinguishes this work from existing transceiver optimization problems. On the basis of alternating optimization, we propose a two-stage algorithm to deal with the resultant non-convex problem riddled with highly coupled variables. First, we alternatively optimize the fully digital transmit precoder and receive equalizer by transforming the optimization problem into a quadratic form. Based on the Block Successive Upper-bound Minimization (BSUM) framework, the optimal fully digital precoder and equalizer can be found by exploiting the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and the matrix monotonic method. Then, inspired by the sparse signal recovery philosophy, the hybrid analog/digital transceiver structure is designed for approximating the fully digital solution. Our numerical results show that the proposed design strikes an improved throughput vs. blockage-resilience trade-off compared to existing schemes, which demonstrates its superiority.