Modulation-mode assignment for SVD-aided and BICM-assisted downlink multiuser MIMO transmission schemes

Abstract

Since the capacity of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems increases linearly with the minimum number of antennas at both the transmitter as well as the receiver side, MIMO systems have attracted a lot of attention for both frequency and non-frequency selective channels and reached a state of maturity. By contrast, MIMO-aided multiple-user systems require substantial further research. In this contribution we jointly optimize the number of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) layers and the number of bits per symbol within an iteratively-detected multiuser MIMO downlink (DL) transmission scheme under the constraint of a given fixed data throughput and integrity. Instead of treating all the users jointly as in zero-forcing (ZF) multiuser transmission techniques, the investigated singular value decomposition (SVD) assisted DL multiuser MIMO system takes the individual user's channel characteristics into account. In analogy to bit-interleaved coded irregular modulation, we introduce a MIMO-BICM scheme, where different user-specific signal constellations and mapping arrangement were used within a single codeword. Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts are used for analyzing and optimizing the convergence behaviour of the iterative demapping and decoding. Our results show that in order to achieve the best bit-error rate, not necessarily all user-specific MIMO layers have to be activated. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.