On the performance of spatial multiplexing in MIMO-WCDMA networks with Principal Component Analysis at the reception

The goal of the study presented in this work is to evaluate the performance of MIMO-WCDMA networks in spatial multiplexing transmission mode. In this context, different bit streams are transmitted from each transmit antenna, in a wireless environment with multipath propagation. Due to the inherent complexity of the network orientation (increased number of active users, multipath components, and transmitted bit streams) a simulation platform has been developed executing independent Monte Carlo (MC) simulations in parallel. Moreover, a proposed transmission algorithm is evaluated as well, which is based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) at the reception. As results indicate, for a 4×2 MIMO orientation (four transmit antennas and two receive antennas) in a multipath propagation environment with 6 multipath components, the selection of the first 5 eigenvectors (i.e. eigenvectors that correspond to the first 5 maximum eigenvalues) can reconstruct the received signal introducing minimum error.