A Tutorial on Interference Exploitation via Symbol-Level Precoding: Overview, State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

IEEE Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless scenarios, achieved by symbol-level precoding (SLP). This paper aims to provide a tutorial on interference exploitation techniques from the perspective of precoding design in a multi-antenna wireless communication system, by beginning with the classification of constructive interference (CI) and destructive interference (DI). The definition for CI is presented and the corresponding mathematical characterization is formulated for popular modulation types, based on which optimization-based precoding techniques are discussed. In addition, the extension of CI precoding to other application scenarios as well as for hardware efficiency is also described. Proof-of-concept testbeds are demonstrated for the potential practical implementation of CI precoding, and finally a list of open problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire and motivate further research directions in this area

Interference Exploitation via Symbol-Level Precoding: Overview, State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Interference is traditionally viewed as a performance limiting factor in wireless communication systems, which is to be minimized or mitigated. Nevertheless, a recent line of work has shown that by manipulating the interfering signals such that they add up constructively at the receiver side, known interference can be made beneficial and further improve the system performance in a variety of wireless scenarios, achieved by symbol-level precoding (SLP). This paper aims to provide a tutorial on interference exploitation techniques from the perspective of precoding design in a multi-antenna wireless communication system, by beginning with the classification of constructive interference (CI) and destructive interference (DI). The definition for CI is presented and the corresponding mathematical characterization is formulated for popular modulation types, based on which optimization-based precoding techniques are discussed. In addition, the extension of CI precoding to other application scenarios as well as for hardware efficiency is also described. Proof-of-concept testbeds are demonstrated for the potential practical implementation of CI precoding, and finally a list of open problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire and motivate further research directions in this area

A Two-stage Vector Perturbation Scheme for Adaptive Modulation in Downlink MU-MIMO

Conventional vector perturbation (VP) is not directly applicable to adaptive modulation while other existing algorithms are suboptimal due to the reduced search dimension of perturbation vectors. In this paper, by applying a simple transformation to the conventional VP operation, the search dimension for the proposed joint vector perturbation is made equal to that of conventional VP, and therefore the performance advantages of VP still hold in this scenario. Furthermore, to reduce the computational complexity, a joint constructive VP scheme is introduced by exploiting constructive interference to simplify the VP operation. By doing so, the sophisticated search for perturbation vectors is partially replaced by a quadratic programming problem, therefore saving significant computational complexity. Our analysis and results show that the proposed scheme offers an improved performance-complexity tradeoff compared to conventional VP approaches by means of the measurement in energy efficiency

Symbol-level and Multicast Precoding for Multiuser Multiantenna Downlink: A State-of-the-art, Classification and Challenges

Precoding has been conventionally considered as an effective means of mitigating or exploiting the interference in the multiantenna downlink channel, where multiple users are simultaneously served with independent information over the same channel resources. The early works in this area were focused on transmitting an individual information stream to each user by constructing weighted linear combinations of symbol blocks (codewords). However, more recent works have moved beyond this traditional view by: i) transmitting distinct data streams to groups of users and ii) applying precoding on a symbol-per-symbol basis. In this context, the current survey presents a unified view and classification of precoding techniques with respect to two main axes: i) the switching rate of the precoding weights, leading to the classes of block-level and symbol-level precoding, ii) the number of users that each stream is addressed to, hence unicast, multicast, and broadcast precoding. Furthermore, the classified techniques are compared through representative numerical results to demonstrate their relative performance and uncover fundamental insights. Finally, a list of open theoretical problems and practical challenges are presented to inspire further research in this area

Error Probability Analysis and Power Allocation for Interference Exploitation Over Rayleigh Fading Channels

This paper considers the performance analysis of constructive interference (CI) precoding technique in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems with a finite constellation phase-shift keying (PSK) input alphabet. Firstly, analytical expressions for the moment generating function (MGF) and the average of the received signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) are derived. Then, based on the derived MGF expression the average symbol error probability (SEP) for the CI precoder with PSK signaling is calculated. In this regard, new exact and very accurate asymptotic approximation for the average SEP are provided. Building on the new performance analysis, different power allocation schemes are considered to enhance the achieved SEP. In the first scheme, power allocation based on minimizing the sum symbol error probabilities (Min-Sum) is studied, while in the second scheme the power allocation based on minimizing the maximum SEP (Min-Max) is investigated. Furthermore, new analytical expressions of the throughput and power efficiency of the CI precoding in MU-MISO systems are also derived. The numerical results in this work demonstrate that, the CI precoding outperforms the conventional interference suppression precoding techniques with an up to 20 dB gain in the transmit SNR in terms of SEP, and up to 15 dB gain in the transmit SNR in terms of the throughput. In addition, the SEP-based power allocation schemes provide additional up to 13 dB gains in the transmit SNR compared to the conventional equal power allocation scheme

A constellation scaling approach to vector perturbation for adaptive modulation in MU-MIMO

It is known that vector perturbation (VP) precoding does not apply to the case where users employ different modulations, while existing solutions for this scenario are suboptimal. In this letter, a joint vector perturbation precoding algorithm is proposed for multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) downlink system in the adaptive modulation scenario where different users apply different modulation types. Compared with conventional block diagonalized vector perturbation (BD-VP) and user grouping VP where the search dimension of the perturbation vector is reduced, the proposed algorithm keeps the search dimension unchanged by applying a simple transformation to the VP operation. Our analysis and results show that the proposed algorithm provides an applicable VP solution to the adaptive modulation scenario, with optimal VP performance