Receiver Design and Performance Evaluation for MIMO Integrated GSM Systems

We investigate feasibility of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology integration with the existing GSM transceiver architecture. System level performance gains are explored for the full-rate GSM data traffic channel combined with multiple-antenna uplink transmission with n_tau transmit and nR receive antennas. We consider the typical urban environment with Rayleigh fading, when the channel state information is available at the receiver only. The designed receiver adopts a linearly complex MIMO signal detector based on the space matched filtering principle [8] for the GMSK modulation used in the GSM standard. The detector is further integrated with two iterative equalizers that use either iterative turbo equalization or probabilistic data association to provide additional performance gains. Simulated bit-error rate performance results for various antenna configurations illustrate that the MIMO integration can provide dramatic performance gains when compared to the traditional single-antenna GSM system. A potential application for this technology is high rate uploading of multimedia contents generated by mobile users.