A new beamforming structure based on transmit-MRC for closed-loop MIMO systems

Abstract

This paper proposes an efficient beamforming scheme which attains optimality as singular value decomposition (SVD) based systems with low complexity utilizing transmit maximum-ratio combining (TMRC) techniques. The TMRC scheme is the optimum structure for single beamforming systems in terms of received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in multiple-input single-output (MISO) channels. In this paper, we generalize the TMRC scheme to multiple beamforming multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems which support more than one data stream in coded systems. We express each beamforming vector as a linear combination of TMRC vectors whose coefficients are optimized in a successive manner. Optimization of the beamforming vector is followed by the decorrelation process. All TMRC vectors used as a basis of the remaining beamforming vectors are made orthogonal to previously computed beamforming vectors. Exploiting the concept of the gradient ascent algorithm, we propose a simple non-iterative method of computing the precoder which obtains the near optimal performance. Also we derive a closed form expression of the output SNR distribution for the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the almost identical link performance as the SVD-based system for arbitrary configurations with reduced complexity.