This paper deals with the problem of sparse beamforming for interference mitigation in milimiter wave (mm Wave) frequency bands. Multiantenna solutions in mmWave are generally implemented with phase shifters which are known to have good interference rejection capabilities. However, phase shifters are power-demanding components and, depending on their resolution, they require bulky hardware solutions able to accommodate the control lines. On the other hand, the use of switches leads to a cost-efficient alternative able to provide a sufficiently large interference rejection while substantially reducing the hardware cost and power consumption. This work proposes a beamforming scheme able to maximize the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) assuming that the beamforming weights can only take 0 and 1 values. The resulting optimization problem is a binary quadratic fractional problem which is a difficult non-convex problem. Two optimization approaches are proposed; namely, the semidefinite relaxation and the penalized convex-concave procedure. We show that both techniques behave well in the considered scenarios and their performance is close to the optimization problem upper bound value.

Peer Reviewed