Transmit antenna selection and user selection in multiuser MIMO downlink systems

Abstract

Multiuser multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) systems play essential role in improving throughput performance and link reliability in wireless communications. This improvement can be achieved by exploiting the spatial domain and without the need of additional power and bandwidth. In this thesis, three main issues which are of importance to the data rate transmission have been investigated. Firstly, antenna selection in MU-MIMO downlink systems has been considered, where this technique can be e fficiently used to reduce the complexity and cost caused by radio frequency chains, associated with antennas, while keeping most of the diversity advantages of the system. We proposed a transmit antenna selection algorithm which can select an optimal set of antennas for transmission in descending order depending on the product of eigenvalues of users' effective channels. The capacity achieved by the proposed algorithm is about 99:6% of the capacity of the optimum search method, with much lower complexity. Secondly, user selection technology in MU-MIMO downlink systems has been studied. Based on the QR decomposition, we proposed a greedy suboptimal user selection algorithm which adopts the product of singular values of users' effective channels as a selection metric. The performance achieved by the proposed algorithm is identical to that of the capacity-based algorithm, with significant reduction in complexity. Finally, a proportional fairness scheduling algorithm for MU-MIMO downlink systems has been proposed. By utilising the upper triangular matrix obtained by applying the QRD on the users' effective channel matrices, two selection metrics have been proposed to achieve the scheduling process. The first metric is based on the maximum entry of the upper triangular matrix, while the second metric is designed using the ratio between the maximum and minimum entries of the triangular matrix multiplied by the product of singular values of effective channels. The two metric provide significant degrees of fairness. For each of these three issues, a different precoding method has been used in order to cancel the interuser interference before starting the selection process. This allows to investigate each precoding design separately and to evaluate the computational burden required for each design.