Diversity Analysis of Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems

This paper is concerned with asymptotic diversity analysis for millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems. First, for a single-user mmWave system employing distributed antenna subarray architecture in which the transmitter and receiver consist of Kt and Kr subarrays, respectively, a diversity gain theorem is established when the numbers of antennas at subarrays go to infinity. Specifically, assuming that all subchannels have the same number of propagation paths L, the theorem states that by employing such a distributed antenna-subarray architecture, a diversity gain of KrKtL−Ns+1 can be achieved, where Ns is the number of data streams. This result means that compared to the co-located antenna architecture, using the distributed antenna-subarray architecture can scale up the diversity gain or multiplexing gain proportionally to KrKt. The diversity gain analysis is then extended to the multiuser scenario as well as the scenario with conventional partially-connected RF structure in the literature. Simulation results obtained with the hybrid analog/digital processing corroborate the analysis results and show that the distributed subarray architecture indeed yields significantly better diversity performance than the co-located antenna architectures.