Performance of precoding assisted dual-polarized multi-cell MIMO downlink communications

Conventional uni-polarized multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna systems offer the advantages of higher data rate and higher reliability through the use of spatial multiplexing and space-time coding, respectively. However, the cost and space constraints have led to the use of dual-polarized MIMO antenna systems where two spatially separated uni-polarized antennas are replaced by a single antenna element employing orthogonal polarizations, thereby exploiting polarization diversity. The advantages of dual polarized antennas can be further exploited by the use of precoding at the transmitter which leads to reduced complexity at the receiver for downlink communications, when compared to the conventional multi-user detectors. In this paper, we propose a singular value decomposition based precoding-aided dual-polarized MIMO system and compare its performance with the conventional minimum mean square error (MMSE) based approach for mitigating co-channel interference in a multi-cell environment consisting of flat Rayleigh fading channels. Our performance results reveal that the pre-coding aided dual-polarized MIMO system outperforms the conventional MMSE detection scheme and offers appreciable gain in symbol energy-to-noise ratio performance.