Receive Combining vs. Multi-Stream Multiplexing in Downlink Systems with Multi-Antenna Users

In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas $N$ and the use of these antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the multi-antenna users is much larger than $N$, the maximal multiplexing gain can be achieved with many different transmission/reception strategies. For example, the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to users with well-conditioned channels, and/or to enable interference-aware receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the $N$ data streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users (few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or one stream per scheduled user---the two extremes in data stream allocation. While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user (i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the throughput optimization.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 16 pages, 11 figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code: https://github.com/emilbjornson/one-or-multiple-stream

Dual-Branch MRC Receivers under Spatial Interference Correlation and Nakagami Fading

Despite being ubiquitous in practice, the performance of maximal-ratio combining (MRC) in the presence of interference is not well understood. Because the interference received at each antenna originates from the same set of interferers, but partially de-correlates over the fading channel, it possesses a complex correlation structure. This work develops a realistic analytic model that accurately accounts for the interference correlation using stochastic geometry. Modeling interference by a Poisson shot noise process with independent Nakagami fading, we derive the link success probability for dual-branch interference-aware MRC. Using this result, we show that the common assumption that all receive antennas experience equal interference power underestimates the true performance, although this gap rapidly decays with increasing the Nakagami parameter $m_{\text{I}}$ of the interfering links. In contrast, ignoring interference correlation leads to a highly optimistic performance estimate for MRC, especially for large $m_{\text{I}}$. In the low outage probability regime, our success probability expression can be considerably simplified. Observations following from the analysis include: (i) for small path loss exponents, MRC and minimum mean square error combining exhibit similar performance, and (ii) the gains of MRC over selection combining are smaller in the interference-limited case than in the well-studied noise-limited case.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Transmit antenna selection in fading wireless communication systems

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-83).To address the drawbacks associated with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, we propose the use of the transmit antenna selection technique. In transmit antenna selection, the best performing antenna(s) is selected from all the available transmit antennas for transmission. Transmit antenna selection reduces the number of radio frequency chains, and the system complexity while still achieving the goals of multiple antenna systems. In this thesis the performance of a MIMO system employing transmit antenna selection and maximal-ratiocombining is studied