Vector Perturbation Precoding Revisited

We consider the downlink of a multiuser system with multiple antennas at the base station. Vector perturbation (VP) precoding is a promising variant of transmit-side channel inversion allowing the users to detect their data in a simple, noncooperative manner. VP precoding has so far been developed and analyzed under the assumptions that the transmitter has perfect channel state information (CSI) and that the receivers know perfectly a channel-dependent transmit power normalization factor and have infinite dynamic range. We demonstrate that the violation of any of these idealizing assumptions degrades the performance of VP significantly and almost always results in an error floor. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel scheme which we term transmit outage precoding (TOP). With TOP, the transmitter uses a prearranged power scaling known by the receivers and refrains from transmitting when channel conditions are poor. We further show how to augment TOP and conventional VP to deal with a finite dynamic range at the receiver. The performance of the proposed schemes under various levels of transmit CSI is studied in terms of a theoretical diversity analysis and illustrated by numerical results.