Analysis of SVD-Based Hybrid Schemes for Massive MIMO with Phase Noise and Imperfect Channel Estimation

In hybrid analog-digital schemes, proposed to reduce the number of RF chains especially at millimeter waves, the precoding at the transmitter and the combining at the receiver are split into digital and analog parts. We analyze the sensitivity of hybrid schemes to phase noise and channel estimation errors and we compare them to a full-digital approach. The scheme adopted for the analog part employs fixed phase shifters, then the digital part is optimized by a singular-value decomposition. We derive analytical expressions for the interference and the SNR degradation arising from the imperfect decomposition due to phase noise and the channel estimation error, for typical millimter-wave massive MIMO channels. In particular we show that when the channel estimation is made in the beam-space, this hybrid scheme is more robust to the phase noise and to the channel estimation errors than a full-digital approach.