An Efficient Transmission Strategy for the Multicarrier Multiuser MIMO Downlink

A new transmission strategy that consists of a spatial scheduling algorithm and two precoding algorithms is developed for multicarrier multiuser (MU) multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The scheduling algorithm, which is called efficient multicarrier ProSched (EMC-ProSched), adopts a novel and effective scheduling metric for each user and can efficiently search for a suitable group of users to be served at the same time on the same frequency. Two precoding techniques are then designed to handle different antenna configurations. For the case where the number of transmit antennas at the base station (BS) is not smaller than the total number of receive antennas at the user terminals (UTs), the linear-precoding-based geometric mean decomposition (LP-GMD) algorithm is proposed. It suppresses the MU interference (MUI) and enables an effective implementation of the same modulation and coding scheme (MCS) on all spatial streams of each user. Consequently, smaller signaling overhead is required compared with the case where a different MCS is applied on each spatial stream. When the total number of receive antennas at the UTs exceeds the number of transmit antennas at the BS, we propose the low-complexity coordinated beamforming (LoCCoBF) algorithm to accomplish the goal of the MUI mitigation and to achieve a high capacity. A system-level simulator with a link-to-system interface is further developed under the framework of the IEEE 802.11ac standard to evaluate the performance of the proposed transmission strategy. The simulation results indicate that a promising performance can be achieved by employing the proposed transmission strategy.