Cellular MIMO Systems

Abstract

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been accepted as a promising technology for its potential to achieve low bit error rate (BER) by space time coding [1] or to achieve large capacity by multiplexing [2]. MIMO multiplexing has been widely adopted to realize high speed data communications. The capacity of MIMO systems in the point-to-point transmission without external interferences has been studied in [3, 4] to show that large capacity can be achieved in a rich scattering environment. In a cellular environment, the same frequency/frequencies can be used in neighboring cells. As a result, co-channel interference exists and the channel between the base-station (BS) and the mobile-station (MS) is changed from noise-limited channel to interference-limited channel. Recently, the capacity of MIMO systems in the cellular environment has attracted much interest. Uplink (transmission from MS to BS) capacity with variable-rate transmissions is studied in [5]. By modeling the co-channel interference as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), the uplink capacity is also studied in [6, 7]. On the other hand, from the users’ stand point, the downlink capacity may be more interesting. However, the results for the downlink capacity of cellular MIMO systems presented in the literature are mainly based on the simulation results. Very detailed simulation results for the downlink MIMO capacity in 3G FDD WCDMA cellular systems can be found in [8]. By assuming single-frequency-reuse (the frequency reuse factor (FRF) equals to 1), the capacity of downlink cellular MIMO systems is studied by simulations and the results are presented in [9, 10]. These results are given in terms of the number of antennas, the modulation schemes, the propagation parameters as well as the cell size. However, FRFs other than 1 are not considered. By taking various FRFs into consideration, a comparative study on the capacity of cellular MIMO systems is presented in [11]. A comprehensive comparison between the capacity of SISO, SIMO, STBC-MISO and MIMO systems in a cellular environment is made based on the simulation results. In general, fixed FRF has been considered in cellular systems. It is reported in [12] that a flexible FRF may help to improve the capacity for cellular single antenna (SISO) systems. However, flexible design of FRF for cellular MIMO systems is rarely available in the literature. In this chapter, the downlink capacity of cellular MIMO systems is theoretically analyzed in terms of both the ergodic and outage capacities. The theoretical results of the best and worst situation capacities suggest that the greatest capacities may be achieved by using FRF 1 or FRF 3 adaptively according to the situations. Therefore, a hybrid frequency reuse scheme is