Simplified QR-decomposition based and
lattice reduction-assisted multi-user
multiple-input–multiple-output
precoding scheme
ISSN 1751-8628
Received on 16th July 2015
Revised on 11th November 2015
Accepted on 21st December 2015
doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2015.0643
www.ietdl.org
Shu Fang
✉
, Jian Wu, Chengyi Lu, Zong-di Yue, Yuan-chao Han
Department of National key Laboratory on Communications, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731,
People’s Republic of China
✉ E-mail: fangshu@uestc.edu.cn
Abstract: Future wireless communication sy stems require more and more antennas at the transceiver to improve the
achievable rates. Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technique is r egarded as a potential technique
to serve large number of users simultaneously to further increase the achievable rates in MIMO systems. If
the number of antennas at the transceiv er is large, the computational complexity of precoding becomes the b ottleneck
and a big challenge in MU-MIMO system. In this paper, a simplified QR decomposition with lattice reduction assisted
MU-MIMO precoding scheme named S-QR-LR is proposed as a low-compl e xity MU-MIMO transm issio n s cheme . T he
simplified QR decomposition method is delicately designed and operated twice for the proposed precoding scheme not
only to achieve good performance but also reduce the computational complexity significantly. The proposed S-QR-LR
scheme first uses the simplified QR decomposition operation to balance the multi-user interference and the noise.
Then, the proposed S-QR-LR precoding scheme utilizes the simplified QR decomposition metho d agai n with the assist
of lattice reduction to obtain the precoding gain to further improve the performance with low computational
complexity. Analytical and simulation results sho w that the prop osed S-QR-L R precoding scheme achieves best
performance among the existing precoding schemes, but requires the lowest computational complexity.
1 Introduction
Multi-user multiple-input–multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technique,
a potential method to improve data rate and achieve high capacity
has been extensively studied in recent years [1, 2]. The vertical
Bell laboratories layered space–time (VBLAST) MIMO technique
is first designed in [3] for high data rate transmission. VBLAST
architecture utilises the MIMO configuration to provide parallel
layered transmission in spatial domain to improve the spectrum
efficiency. The drawback of VBLAST is that more receive
antennas are required than the transmitter, which is always not
valid in downlink cellular systems. In consequence, the
MU-MIMO precoding [4] technique for downlink MIMO systems
that requires channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, is
developed to solve the problem. The spatial division multiple
access-based MU-MIMO technique improves the achievable rate
by transmitting the data of multiple users simultaneously and
pre-cancelling the MU interference (MUI) at the transmitter with
the CSI. To meet the continuous growing demands for high data
rates, MU-MIMO systems [5] with more transmit antennas have
attracted much attention for the future wireless communication
systems. The configuration of up to eight transmit antennas at base
station (BS) in LTE-advanced [6] and IEEE 802.11ac [7]is
suggested. Massive MIMO (also known as large-scale antenna
systems, very large MIMO and hyper MIMO) is an emerging
technology that uses a few hundred antennas simultaneously to
serve tens of terminals in the same time–frequency resource [8, 9].
Therefore, MU-MIMO is regarded as a potential technique to
serve large number of users simultaneously in future massive
MIMO systems. Thus, the computational complexity of precoding
becomes the bottleneck and a big challenge in MU-MIMO
systems with large antennas at the transceiver.
In MU-MIMO systems, the MUI is the major problem that affects
its performance severely. The objective of MU-MIMO techniques is
to cancel the MUI via precoding at BS before transmission. The
zero-forcing channel-inversion (ZF-CI) precoding is first proposed
in [10], which introduces a ZF equaliser at the transmitter instead
of the receiver to pre-cancel the MUI. However, ZF-CI precoding
results in low performance due to the reason that the precoding
vectors after ZF operation is non-unitary that will amplify the
noise, especially when the channel is ill-conditioned. The
well-known block diagonalisation (BD) precoding scheme that is
regarded as a generalisation of the ZF-CI precoding is proposed in
[11, 12]. Two singular value decomposition (SVD) operations are
implemented for each user in BD precoding algorithm. The MUI
from other users is eliminated completely by adopting the first
SVD operation to MUI MIMO channel. Thus, the MU-MIMO
broadcast channel is decomposed into multiple parallel single-user
MIMO (SU-MIMO) channels. Then, the second SVD operation is
implemented to parallelise each user’s streams and obtain
maximum precoding gain for each sub-stream to further improve
the performance. BD precoding provides better performance than
ZF-CI precoding due to the reason that the unitary precoding
vectors for BD will not amplify the noise after precoding.
However, the computational costs of BD precoding scheme is very
heavy because of two SVD operations for each user.
Recent researches for MU-MIMO in [13, 14] focus on designing
the BD-type precoding schemes with less computational complexity.
By replacing the first SVD operation with a less complex solution to
mitigate the MUI, a QR-decomposition-based BD (QR-BD)
precoding scheme is presented in [13] for MU-MIMO systems.
QR-BD utilises a QR-decomposition to the MUI MIMO channel
to obtain the null space of MUI. Therefore, the complexity of
SVD operation in BD precoding is reduced by QR operation in
QR-BD precoding. Similar to the QR-BD precoding scheme, a
generalised ZF-CI (GZI) precoding method is developed in [14],
where the MUI MIMO channel is operated first by pseudo
inversion and then QR-decomposition to mitigate the MUI. Both
IET Communications
Research Article
IET Commun., 2016, Vol. 10, Iss. 5, pp. 586–593
586 This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License
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