Single-Carrier Multi-User MIMO Downlink with Time-Domain Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding

Abstract

Nonlinear precoding improves the downlink bit error rate (BER) performance of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO). Broadband single-carrier (SC) block transmission can improve the capability that nonlinear precoding reduces BER, as it provides frequency diversity gain. This paper considers Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) as a nonlinear precoding scheme for SC-MU-MIMO downlink. In the SC-MU-MIMO downlink with frequency-domain THP proposed by Degen and Rrühl (called SC-FDTHP), the inter-symbol interference (ISI) is suppressed by transmit frequency-domain equalization (FDE) after suppressing the inter-user interference (IUI) by frequency-domain THP. Transmit FDE increases the signal variance, hence transmission performance improvement is limited. In this paper, we propose a new SC-MU-MIMO downlink with time-domain THP which can pre-remove both ISI and IUI (called SC-TDTHP) if perfect channel state information (CSI) is available. Modulo operation in THP suppresses the signal variance increase caused by ISI and IUI pre-removal, and hence the transmission quality improves. For further performance improvement, vector perturbation is introduced to SC-TDTHP (called SC-TDTHP w/VP). Computer simulation shows that SC-TDTHP achieves better BER performance than SC-FDTHP and that SC-TDTHP w/VP offers further improvement in BER performance over SC-MU-MIMO with VP (called SC-VP). Computational complexity is also compared and it is showed that SC-TDTHP and SC-TDTHP w/VP incur higher computational complexity than SC-FDTHP but lower than SC-VP.