Analytical Characterization of Dual-Band Multi-User MIMO-OFDM System with Nonlinear Transmitter Constraints

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that carrier-aggregated multi-user (MU) multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems can deliver unprecedented improvements in network throughput and capacity when compared with existing systems. However, most of these studies fail to take into account the nonlinear constraints that limit the performance of such systems. This paper proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the end-to-end performance of a carrier-aggregated dual-band (DB) MU-MIMO-OFDM system in the presence of transmitter nonlinearity. Specifically, we derive the closed-form expression for signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and further utilize this expression to evaluate the average capacity and symbol error rate of a nonlinear DB MU-MIMO-OFDM system in a multi-path Rayleigh fading channel. We show that the transmit preprocessing technique conventionally used to mitigate inter-user interference in a linear DB MU-MIMO-OFDM system fails to eliminate inter-user interference in a nonlinear DB MU-MIMO-OFDM system. As a consequence, there is an irreducible error floor which is function of number of aggregated bands as well as number of users present in the system. The irreducible error floor has been shown to considerably deteriorate the performance of nonlinear DB MU-MIMO-OFDM system. Simulation results are also reported to validate the efficacy of the proposed analysis.