Hybrid MU-MIMO Precoding Based on K-Means User Clustering.

Multi-User (MU) Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems have been extensively investigated over the last few years from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The low complexity Linear Precoding (LP) schemes for MU-MIMO are already deployed in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks; however, they do not work well for users with strongly-correlated channels. Alternatives to those schemes, like Non-Linear Precoding (NLP), and hybrid precoding schemes were proposed in the standardization phase for the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5G New Radio (NR). NLP schemes have better performance, but their complexity is prohibitively high. Hybrid schemes, which combine LP schemes to serve users with separable channels and NLP schemes for users with strongly-correlated channels, can help reduce the computational burden, while limiting the performance degradation. Finding the optimum set of users that can be co-scheduled through LP schemes could require an exhaustive search and, thus, may not be affordable for practical systems. The purpose of this paper is to present a new semi-orthogonal user selection algorithm based on the statistical K-means clustering and to assess its performance in MU-MIMO systems employing hybrid precoding schemes.