In downlink multi-antenna systems with many users, the multiplexing gain is strictly limited by the number of transmit antennas N and the use of these antennas. Assuming that the total number of receive antennas at the multi-antenna users is much larger than N, the maximal multiplexing gain can be achieved with many different transmission reception strategies. For example, the excess number of receive antennas can be utilized to schedule users with effective channels that are near-orthogonal, for multi-stream multiplexing to users with well-conditioned channels, and or to enable interference-aware receive combining. In this paper, we try to answer the question if the N data streams should be divided among few users (many streams per user) or many users (few streams per user, enabling receive combining). Analytic results are derived to show how user selection, spatial correlation, heterogeneous user conditions, and imperfect channel acquisition (quantization or estimation errors) affect the performance when sending the maximal number of streams or one stream per scheduled user-the two extremes in data stream allocation. While contradicting observations on this topic have been reported in prior works, we show that selecting many users and allocating one stream per user (i.e., exploiting receive combining) is the best candidate under realistic conditions. This is explained by the provably stronger resilience towards spatial correlation and the larger benefit from multi-user diversity. This fundamental result has positive implications for the design of downlink systems as it reduces the hardware requirements at the user devices and simplifies the throughput optimization.
Despite the similar terminology, our problem is fundamentally different from the classic works on the diversity-spatial multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) in @cite_28 @cite_19 . The DMT brings insight on how many streams should be transmitted in the high-SNR regime, while we consider how a fixed number of streams should be divided among the users.
@cite_28 @cite_19
2160800591 2155797792 2099857870 2006462346
Explicit code constructions for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access channels (MAC) with K users are presented in this paper. The first construction is dedicated to the case of symmetric MIMO-MAC where all the users have the same number of transmit antennas nt and transmit at the same level of per-user multiplexing gain r. Furthermore, we assume that the users transmit in an independent fashion and do not cooperate. The construction is systematic for any values of K, nt and r. It is proved that this newly proposed construction achieves the optimal MIMO-MAC diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT) provided by Tse at high-SNR regime. In the second part of the paper we take a further step to investigate the MAC-DMT of a general MIMO-MAC where the users are allowed to have different numbers of transmit antennas and can transmit at different levels of multiplexing gain. The exact optimal MAC-DMT of such channel is explicitly characterized in this paper. Interestingly, in the general MAC-DMT, some users might not be able to achieve their single-user DMT performance as in the symmetric case, even when the multiplexing gains of the other users are close to 0. Detailed explanations of such unexpected result are provided in this paper. Finally, by generalizing the code construction for the symmetric MIMO-MAC, explicit code constructions are provided for the general MIMO-MAC and are proved to be optimal in terms of the general MAC-DMT. The diversity-multiplexing (D-M) tradeoff in a multi antenna channel with optimized resolution-constrained channel state feedback is characterized. The concept of minimum guaranteed multiplexing gain in the forward link is introduced and shown to significantly influence the optimal D-M tradeoff. It is demonstrated that power control based on the feedback is instrumental in achieving the D-M tradeoff, and that rate adaptation is important in obtaining a high diversity gain even at high rates. A criterion to determine finite-length codes to be tradeoff optimal is presented, leading to a useful geometric characterization of the class of extended approximately universal codes. With codes from this class, the optimal D-M tradeoff is achievable by the combination of a feedback-dependent power controller and a single code-book for single-rate or two codebooks for adaptive-rate transmission. Finally, lower bounds to the optimal D-M tradeoffs based on Gaussian coding arguments are also studied. In contrast to the no-feedback case, these random coding bounds are only asymptotically tight, but can quickly approach the optimal tradeoff even with moderate codeword lengths. We consider a general multiple-antenna network with multiple sources, multiple destinations, and multiple relays in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). We examine several subcases of this most general problem taking into account the processing capability of the relays (half-duplex or full-duplex), and the network geometry (clustered or nonclustered). We first study the multiple-antenna relay channel with a full-duplex relay to understand the effect of increased degrees of freedom in the direct link. We find DMT upper bounds and investigate the achievable performance of decode-and-forward (DF), and compress-and-forward (CF) protocols. Our results suggest that while DF is DMT optimal when all terminals have one antenna each, it may not maintain its good performance when the degrees of freedom in the direct link are increased, whereas CF continues to perform optimally. We also study the multiple-antenna relay channel with a half-duplex relay. We show that the half-duplex DMT behavior can significantly be different from the full-duplex case. We find that CF is DMT optimal for half-duplex relaying as well, and is the first protocol known to achieve the half-duplex relay DMT. We next study the multiple-access relay channel (MARC) DMT. Finally, we investigate a system with a single source-destination pair and multiple relays, each node with a single antenna, and show that even under the ideal assumption of full-duplex relays and a clustered network, this virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system can never fully mimic a real MIMO DMT. For cooperative systems with multiple sources and multiple destinations the same limitation remains in effect. As one of the key technologies for future wireless communication systems, user cooperation has a great potential in improving the system performance. In this paper, the diversity benefit of user cooperation is evaluated using diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) as the performance metric. Ways of exploiting the diversity benefit are devised. We investigate two typical channel models, namely, the multiple-access channel (MAC) and the interference channel (IFC). For the MAC, all the terminals are equipped with multiple antennas and the K(K ≥ 2) sources cooperate in a full-duplex mode. We determine the optimal DMT of the channel and propose a compressed-and-forward (CF) based cooperation scheme to achieve the optimal DMT. For the IFC, we consider a two-user channel with single-antenna terminals and full-duplex source cooperation. A DMT upper bound and two DMT lower bounds are derived. The upper bound is derived based on a channel capacity upper bound, and the lower bounds are derived using decode-and-forward (DF) based cooperation schemes. In most channel scenarios, the bounds are found to be tight. This implies that under certain channel scenarios, the optimal DMT of the channel can be achieved by DF-based cooperation schemes.