Power-efficient Tomlinson-Harashima precoding for the downlink of multi-user MISO systems

Abstract

We propose a power-efficient Tomlinson-Harashima precoder (THP) in the downlink of multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems, where a transmit power reduction is achieved by means of interference optimization. The adopted approach is based on adaptively scaling the symbols of a number of users whose received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) thresholds are known to the transmitter. By doing this, the interference can be better aligned to the symbols of interest, thus reducing the power required to cancel it. The scaling is performed by forming a constrained optimization problem, solved with existing well-known techniques, which entails an increase in the computational complexity at the base station. To quantify this trade-off in performance and complexity, a study of the impact in the signal processing load is carried out by means of a power efficiency analysis. The presented analytical and simulation results in this paper confirm that the proposed technique increases the power efficiency up to 100% with respect to previous THP-based approaches while, at the same time, maintaining the same average performance. © 1972-2012 IEEE.