Digital Predistortion for MIMO Transmitters Using Multi-Channel Error Feedback Adaptation

Digital predistortion (DPD) is known as an efficient solution to suppress nonlinear distortion of power amplifiers (PAs) in wireless transmitters to achieve both high linearity and power efficiency. In multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) applications, the power gains of multiple transmitting channels are usually different. Meanwhile, the channel crosstalk cannot be ignored, given the isolations between the physical channels are limited. Accordingly, the linearization performances of the conventional DPD methods are usually degraded. In this article, we propose a novel DPD method for MIMO transmitters, where both the crosstalk and different power gains of multiple channels are considered. In this method, the expected predistorted signals, which would be used to train the DPD model, are firstly obtained by an iterative algorithm derived from the contraction mapping theorem. Then, the coefficients of a MIMO-DPD model are extracted by fitting the DPD model to the obtained predistorted signal. Experimental results verify that the extracted coefficients can achieve an improved linearization performance for the MIMO transmitter with crosstalk between the channels, especially in the case where the channel gains are different. Specifically, for a $2 \times 2$ MIMO transmitter with -20 dB crosstalk and 1.2 dB difference between the two channel gains, the proposed DPD improves the adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) from -31.4 dBc to -47.1 dBc, which outperforms the conventional DPD by 6.8 dB.