Performance evaluation of MIMO-WCDMA networks employing Principal Component Analysis at the reception

The goal of the study presented in this paper is to investigate the performance of MIMO-WCDMA networks, where Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is employed at the reception. In this context, multipath propagation is exploited, as the individual received signals can be seen as different instances of the same physical phenomenon (i.e. transmission and reception of WCDMA sequences). As results indicate, the deployment of PCA technique in MIMO-WCDMA networks can significantly reduce the number of active channels that need to be fed back to the transmitter. In particular, for 10/20/30 active users and six multipath components, the mean number of estimated channels that are necessary for appropriate signal reception are 4.2/3.88/3.89 for a Signal to Noise Ratio equal to 6 dB.