Online Resource Management for the Uplink of Wideband Hybrid Beamforming System

This paper studies the radio resource management (RRM) for the uplink (UL) of a cellular system with codebook-based hybrid beamforming. We consider the often neglected but highly practical multi-channel case with fewer radio frequency chains in the base station than user equipment (UEs) in the cell, assuming one RF chain per UE. As for any UL RRM, a per-time slot solution is needed as the allocation of power to subchannels by a UE can only be done once it knows which subchannels it has been allocated. The RRM in this system comprises beam selection, user selection and power allocation, three steps that are intricately coupled and we will show that the order in which they are performed does impact performance and so does the amount of coupling that we take into account. Specifically, we propose 4 online sequential solutions with different orders in which the steps are called and of different complexities, i.e., different levels of coupling between the steps. Our extensive numerical campaign for a mmWave system shows how a well-designed heuristic that takes some level of couplings between the steps can make the performance exceedingly better than a benchmark.