IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO.
11, NOVEMBER 2008
Block Diagonalized Vector Perturbation for Multiuser MIMO Systems
Chan-Byoung Chae, Student Member, IEEE, Seijoon Shim, Member, IEEE,
and Robert W. Heath, Jr., Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—Precoding with block diagonalization (BD) is an
attractive technique for approaching the sum capacity in the
multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast
channel. Unfortunately, BD requires either global channel state
information at every receiver or an additional training phase,
which demands additional control overhead and additional sys-
tem planning. In this paper we propose a new multiuser MIMO
algorithm that combines BD with vector perturbation (VP). The
proposed algorithm avoids the second training phase, reduces
each user’s receiver complexity thanks to pre-equalization with
VP at the transmitter, and has comparable diversity performance
to BD with maximum likelihood decoding algorithm. A bound
on the achievable sum rate for the proposed technique is derived
and used to show that BD with VP approaches the achievable
sum rate of BD with water-filling. Numerical simulations confirm
that the proposed technique provides better bit error rate and
diversity performance than BD with a zero-forcing receiver as
well as BD with zero-forcing precoding.
Index Terms—MIMO systems, broadcast channels, nonlinear
system, perturbation methods, spatial filtering, interference sup-
pression.
I. I NTRODUCTION
R ECENT information theoretic work on multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) communication has shown that
the capacity region of the broadcast channel is achieved by
dirty paper coding (DPC) [1]–[3]. The key idea of DPC
is to pre-cancel interference at the transmitter using perfect
channel state information (CSI) and complete knowledge of
the transmitted signals. DPC, while theoretically optimal, is
an information theoretic concept that has been shown to be
difficult to implement in practice. Consequently, several near
sum capacity achieving practical techniques based on the
concept of precoding have been proposed that offer different
tradeoffs between complexity and performance [4]–[15].
One of the simplest approaches for multiuser precoding is
to pre-multiply the transmitted signal by a suitably normalized
zero-forcing (ZF) or minimum mean squared error (MMSE)
Manuscript received January 27, 2007; revised November 21, 2007 and July
26, 2008; accepted September 17, 2008. The associate editor coordinating
the review of this paper and approving it for publication was S. Blostein.
This work was supported in part by Samsung Electronics, and also supported
in part by the Korea Research Foundation Grant (KRF-2005-214-D00319)
funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD). This paper was presented in
part at the IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, San Francisco, CA,
November/December 2006.
C. B. Chae and R. W. Heath Jr. are with the Wireless Networking and
Communications Group, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
1 University Station C0803, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
78712-0240 USA (e-mail: {cbchae, rheath}@ece.utexas.edu).
S. Shim is with the Telecommunications R&D Center, Samsung Electronics,
Suwon, Korea (e-mail: seijoon.shim@samsung.com).
C. B. Chae and S. Shim contributed equally to this work (co-1st author in
alphabetical order).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/T-WC.2008.070262
1536-1276/08$25.00 
c 2008 IEEE
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4051
inverse of the multiuser matrix channel [4]. Owing to the
transmit power enhancement resulting from power normaliza-
tion, the gap in the sum rate between DPC and these linear
precoding methods, however, is large.
A way to avoid transmit power enhancement is to use non-
linear precoding such as lattice precoding [6]. Tomlinson-
Harashima MIMO precoding is one example of transmit
precoding with a modulo operation [6]. Another example is
vector perturbation (VP) where the transmit signal vector is
perturbed by another vector to minimize transmit power from
the extended constellation [7]. Finding the optimal perturba-
tion involves solving a minimum distance type problem and
thus can be implemented using sphere-encoding or other full
search-based algorithms. The multiuser precoding approaches
mentioned above assume that the transmitter sends a single
stream to each user. In next generation systems, mobile
terminals may have multiple receive antennas and could thus
receive multiple streams. In this paper, we propose a new
algorithm that allows more than one transmit stream per user.
One precoding algorithm that supports multi-stream trans-
mission with moderate complexity and approaches sum capac-
ity is block diagonalization (BD) [9]–[11]. The basic concept
of BD is to use a transmit precoding matrix that ensures zero
inter-user and inter-stream interference in the received signal
of each user. The resulting multiuser MIMO channel matrix
has a block diagonal form. In general, BD is inferior in terms
of sum capacity to DPC. In the special case, however, where
BD combines user selection algorithms that make all users
subject to semi-orthogonal channels, BD can come close to
the sum capacity achieved by DPC [12]. Several precoding
techniques have been proposed applying successive MMSE
and Tomlinson-Harashima algorithms to implement BD [14].
The main challenge with conventional BD is that under a
dimensionality constraint1 , either global CSI is required at all
the receivers or an additional training phase is needed so that
each user can estimate their equivalent channel and perform
symbol detection [15]. That usually requires a large control
overhead and additional system planning to find a decoding
matrix at every receiver. This coordination information is a
limitation for BD.
In this paper, we present a vector-perturbing MIMO block
diagonalization precoder for the multiuser broadcast channel
where the receiver does not need to estimate the effective
1 The conventional BD requires the number of transmit antennas is at least
summation of the number of receive antennas to cancel multiuser interference,
which is a dimensionality constraint.
4052
Fig. 1. Structure of a lattice-based broadcast SM-MIMO precoding system using the BD algorithm.
channel matrix.2 We assume that the transmitter has full CSI
for all users and satisfies the dimensionality constraint as with
conventional BD [11]. The proposed algorithm exploits the BD
linear precoding algorithm to transmit interference free groups
of data to different users. To avoid the extra coordination
information between the transmitter and receiver, we propose
to use a ZF prefilter combined with multi-stream VP, which
differs from the previous perturbation [7] in operating domain.
Hence, the main features of our approach are that (i) we do not
require coordination information like global CSI at the receiver
or an additional training phase, and that (ii) our approach has
much lower receiver complexity, at the expense of additional
transmit complexity over BD.
We derive an achievable rate, which we define as an error-
free supportable rate that satisfies any given power constraint
[16], of our system under an optimal perturbation assumption.
Through numerical results, we show that the resulting sum
rate is equivalent to that of BD combined with water-filling
in [11] and [12]. We also compare the proposed algorithm
with the conventional BD assuming equal power allocation
[11] and a ZF or maximum likelihood (ML) receiver [9] in
terms of the uncoded bit error rate (BER). We find that our
approach has similar diversity performance to BD with an
ML receiver and much better performance than BD with a ZF
receiver even though we use a low complexity receiver and
do not need the second training phase. Note that we could
use the standard channel inversion approach in [4], [7] and
treat the receive antennas as if they were separate users, and
then full diversity gain can be achieved at the transmitter. The
computational complexity of the channel inversion-based VP
(CI-VP), however, would significantly increase as the number
of transmit antennas at the transmitter increases. In addition,
the same modulation order has to be used in CI-VP while the
proposed systems could use different modulation orders for
each user based on each user’s channel gain, e.g., 4-QAM for
2 Compared with our related conference paper [5], this paper includes a
complexity comparison between different methods, provides a more detailed
proof of the achievable rate, and contains new simulation results to show the
effectiveness of our proposed precoding technique.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008
user 1 and 16-QAM for user 2. Thus, from both rate/diversity
and complexity perspectives, our approach achieves similar
performance to BD with an optimal receiver but with much
lower receiver complexity. This can be a particular advantage
in multiuser systems with low-cost low-power receivers.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II we begin
with the system model and present a summary of BD and its
limitations. In Section III we propose vector-perturbed MIMO
BD and derive its achievable rate. We present numerical
results including achievable rate, probability of bit error, and
complexity in Section IV and conclude in Section V.
II. B ROADCAST MIMO S YSTEM WITH B LOCK
D IAGONALIZATION
In this section we discuss the narrow-band broadcast signal
and channel model under consideration. Then we discuss BD
and its knowledge of coordination information.
A. MIMO Broadcast Signal Model
Consider a MIMO broadcast signal model with K users
each employing Nr,k receive antennas and receiving their own
data streams, which are precoded at the transmitter with Nt
antennas. The channel is assumed to be flat fading, though this
model can be extended to frequency selective fading channels
using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)
modulation. In the broadcast channel, the received signal at
the k-th receiver is3
K

y k = H kF kx k + H k F lx l + n k , (1)
l=1,l=k
where x k is the transmit signal of the k-th user, H k is the
Nrk × Nt channel matrix, and n k is the additive complex
Gaussian noise vector with zero mean and covariance matrix
3 Upper case and lower case boldface are used to denote matrices A and
vectors a , respectively. If A denotes a complex matrix, and A T , A ∗ , A −1
denote the transpose, conjugate transpose, and the inverse of A , respectively.
A F denotes the Frobenius norm of matrix A .
A
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008 4053

σn2 I Nr,k . In (1), F k denotes the precoder for the k-th user, at the transmitter and the decoder of the k-th user also has U k
which is a cascade of two precoding matrices B k and D k at the receiver. Therefore the maximum achievable sum rate
for BD, i.e., F k = B k D k , where B k removes the inter- of the BD algorithm is given by
user interference and D k is used for parallelizing and power

allocation [11]–[15]. BD Λ 2Q
CW F = max log det I + 2 , (8)
Q:Tr(Q
{Q Q)≤PT } σn

B. Block Diagonalization and Its Coordination Information where Λ =diag(Λ Q1 , · · · , Q K ), and a

Λ1 , · · · , Λ K ), Q =diag(Q
In [11], the authors choose B k such that the subspace positive definite matrix Q denotes the optimal power loading
spanned by its columns lies in the null space of H l (∀l = k), subject to a total power constraint PT [11].
that is, H lB k = 0 for l = 1, · · · , K − 1, K + 1, · · · , K. If we To implement the WF algorithm, knowledge of the decoding
define H  k as matrix U k is required at each receiver. The decoding matrix
U k depends, though, on H eff,k , but H eff,k also consists of
 T (0)
 k = HT · · · HT
H 1
T
k−1 H k+1 · · · H K
T
, (2) the original channel matrix H k and the nulling matrix V k .
Because the nulling matrix is calculated by using partial
 k . Let us
then B k can be obtained from the null space of H information about the CSI of other users, the receiver needs

define the SVD of H k as to either calculate the decoding matrix directly from the
 ∗ estimated channel of H eff,k [9] or the transmitter can send
    (1)
 (0) specific information to calculate U k at the k-th receiver [15],
H k = U kΛ k V k Vk , (3)
which is called a coordination information.

where U k and Λ k denote the left singular vector matrix and

the matrix of ordered singular values of H  k , respectively. III. MIMO B LOCK D IAGONALIZATION WITH V ECTOR
(1) (0) P ERTURBATION
Matrices V k and V k denote the right singular matrices
each consisting of the singular vectors corresponding to non- In this section we introduce MIMO BD with vector per-
zero singular values and zero singular values, respectively. To turbation (MIMO BD-VP). Combining BD and perturbation
pre-cancel the interference of the other users, we choose the algorithms, we provide a smart solution that avoids coordi-
precoder B k as nation information, transmits multiple streams for each user

(0) and offers a diversity advantage. The proposed MIMO BD-
B k = V k , (4)
(1:Lk )
VP requires a simple decoder at each user receiver containing
primarily a modulo operation. In this section, we describe the
where, Lk is the number of transmit streams for each user. proposed algorithm with VP. Then, we present an achievable
The received signal of the k-th receiver, y k is given by rate analysis of the proposed system under the assumption of
an optimal perturbation.
y k = H eff,kD k x k + n k , (5)

where H eff,k = H kB k denotes the effective channel of the A. The Proposed MIMO Block Diagonalization with Vector
k-th user and the size of x k is Lk × 1. Since the k-th user Perturbation
receives its own data stream without interference from other The proposed multiuser MIMO BD with VP transceiver is
users, the methodology for designing an appropriate decoder illustrated in Fig. 1. The transmitter encodes each user’s data
is similar to that of single user MIMO cases after channel streams independently. The k-th transmitter consists of the
estimation [9]. cascade of two matrices H −1 eff,k and F k where the effective
To achieve the highest sum rate, after removing the effect of channel H eff,k = H kF k . The precoding matrix F k is F k =
the interfering users’ streams, BD maximizes data throughput B k , where B k is calculated in the same manner of (4). Note
with the well-known water-filling (WF) algorithm [11]. Define that F k has a different form from (7). As mentioned in Section
the SVD of H eff,k II-B, using the optimal BD solution with diagonalization
 ∗ via SVD requires additional coordination information since
Λk 0 ] V (1)
H eff,k = U k [Λ k V
(0)
k , (6) the effective channel used for the SVD operation includes
CSI from other users. To avoid the additional coordination
(1) information, the precoder F k has only to remove multiuser
where V k denotes the set of the right singular vectors
corresponding to non-zero singular values and U k is the left interference. The inversion of H eff,k is used to pre-equalize
(1) 1 and parallelize each user’s stream instead of SVD. In addition,
singular matrix. Taking D k = V k Q k2 where Q k denotes a 1

diagonal matrix whose elements scale the power transmitted transmit power optimization (Q Qk2 ) as seen in (7) is not required
(1) since the same symbol constellation on each stream is used
into each of the column of V k , the precoder of the k-th user
F k is given by for vector-perturbing.
 To prevent transmit power enhancement due to H −1 eff,k , the
(0) (1) 1 proposed transceiver applies a perturbation to the transmitted
Fk = V k V k Q k2 (7)
(1:Lk ) spatial multiplexing signal vector to reduce the norm of the

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4054 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008

precoded signal vector for each user. The perturbation for user
k is given by
 2  2
   
l k = arg min H −1 sk + τll k ) = arg min H −1
eff,k (s eff,k
sk
l k ∈AZ2Lk p k ∈AZ2Lk
(9)
where s k = s k + τll k . In (9), s k and l k are the transmit signal
vector of the k-th user before perturbing and the perturbing
vector of the k-th user and τ is a positive real number,
respectively. Essentially we find the k-th user’s perturbing
vector l k from the set of 2Lk -dimensional lattice points.
Unlike work in [7], the proposed perturbation operates in
stream domain, not in user domain. Since we generally accept
that the number of transmit streams for each user is less
than the number of users, i.e., Lk < K, the implementation
of VP in the proposed transceiver requires smaller a search
dimension than that in [7].
Since the transmitter sends the pre-distorted symbol with a Fig. 2. Comparison between the sum capacity (Csum , [20]) and the
achievable sum rates of MIMO BD with WF (CW BD , [11]), MIMO BD-
F
perturbation, the received signal is TxZF (CTBD (CVBD
xZF , (22)) and the proposed MIMO BD-VP P ). Nt = 4 and
K = 2.
yk = 
sk + nk . (10)
Note that the received signal in (10) consists of the perturbed
From (12), the received signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of
sk ) and the AWGN vector. The receiver has only to
symbol (
each stream, SN Rl , with a total transmit power constraint
map the perturbed symbol back to the original symbol (ssk ) in
E{xxk 2 } = P can be represented by
the fundamental region using modulo operations [8], and the
estimated symbol of s k is given by ρξl2 ρξ 2
SN Rl = = Lk l , (14)
ŝsk = mod(yy k ) (11) γ 2 2
m=1 μm ξm

where mod(·) denotes a modulo operation that operates per where ρ = σP2 . Therefore, the achievable rate of the k-th user,
n
dimension. As mentioned in Section II, mod(·) results in a Rk , is given by
simple decoder at the receiver.

Lk  Lk
ρξl2
Rk = log (1 + SN Rl ) = log 1 + Lk .
2 2
B. Achievable Rate Analysis of MIMO Block Diagonalization l=1 l=1 m=1 μm ξm
with Perturbation (15)
Note that perturbation is not applied yet in calculating (15).
The problem of achievable rate analysis is reduced to the The effect of perturbation is to force the perturbing vector l k
single-user MIMO case thanks to the fact that the nulling to minimize γ and generate a  s k that can only be coarsely
matrix F k removes multiuser interference. Recall the received oriented in the coordinate system defined by u 1 , · · · , u Lk [7].
signal model that uses the effective channel in (5). Define
Therefore, from (15), if we find the proper perturbing vector
H eff,k = U kΛ kV ∗k where U k = [u u 1 · · · u Lk ], V k =
and control ξm to minimize the normalized factor γ, then we
[vv 1 · · · v Lk ] and Λ k = diag (λ1 · · · λLk ). Then the received
can obtain an upper bound on achievable rate of the proposed
signal vector y k for the proposed system is given by
precoder for each user
1 ⎛ ⎞
y k = H eff,kx k + n k = √ I Lk ×Lk 
sk + nk . (12)
γ Lk
⎜ ρξ 2
Rk,prop = log ⎝1 +  l ⎟
⎠. (16)
where x k = √1γ H −1 k . In (12), the normalized scalar factor
eff,ks l=1 min Lk
μ
m=1 m m
2 ξ 2
ξm
of the transmit signal γ is given by
  −1 From (16), we need to solve for
 −1 2
γ = H H eff,k
s k  = s ∗k H eff,kH ∗eff,k 
sk
Lk

Lk
 (13) ξl = arg min μ2m ξm
2
. (17)
s ∗kU kΛ −2
= ∗
k U ksk = μ2l ξl2 , ξm m=1
l=1
1 By the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality, solution of
where μl = > 0 and ξl =
λl
u∗l sk |.
|u
Note that τ is chosen (17) occurs when
large enough so that no  s can be made zero and u i is a
non-zero unit-norm singular vector. Since we consider to have μ21 ξ12 = · · · = μ2Lk ξL
2
= ω02 (18)
k
integer components in perturbing vector l , the case  s k to be
chosen exactly parallel to u l occurs with probability zero. Thus for an arbitrary constant ω02 > 0. Note that, as mentioned,
u∗l 
ξl = |u s k | > 0 [7]. u∗l 
ξl = |u s k | cannot be zero since τ is chosen large enough

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008 4055

Fig. 3. Comparison of the achievable sum rate performance according to Fig. 4. BER performance comparison between the proposed MIMO BD-
the number of users: Nr = 2 and SNR=20 dB. VP and the other MIMO precoding techniques ([7], [9]) for 4-QAM where
Nt = KNr . Note that CI-VP has better BER performance than the proposed
(1) that has the same data rate at the cost of high computational complexity.

and the case sk to be chosen exactly parallel to u l occurs

with probability zero. Therefore, we calculate Rk,prop as IV. N UMERICAL E XPERIMENTS AND R ESULTS
⎛ ⎞ In this section we compare the sum rate and BER per-
ω2
Lk
 ρ μ02 formance of the proposed MIMO BD-VP and other MU-
Rk,prop = log ⎝1 + l ⎠ (19) MIMO algorithms through numerical simulations. To verify
Lk ω02
l=1 the performance of the proposed MIMO BD-VP precoding
Lk
  Lk
  system, we consider several special cases. For analytical
ρ ρλ2
= log 1 + = log 1 + l . simplicity, without breaking the dimensionality constraint as
μ2l Lk Lk
l=1 l=1 mentioned in Section II-B, we assume that the number of
(20) receive antennas for each user is equal to Nr and that each
user receives the same number of streams (Lk ) as the number
We obtain (20) substituting μl for λ1l . Note that the solution of receive antennas. That is, Lk = Nr and Nt = KNr .
of (18) is valid when the lattice size is infinite because we We use the notation {Nr , K} to index the number of each
can find the proper  s k provided that the search range of the user’s antennas and the number of users. We assume that
lattice is infinite. That is, the perturbation finds the perturbed the elements of each user’s channel matrix are independent
symbol that is the closest point to the origin and also controls complex Gaussian random variables with zero mean and unit
the power factor ξl to minimize the transmit symbol power. variance for all numerical results.
In addition, (20) is the same expression as the capacity of
the single user MIMO system with equal power allocation, A. Achievable Sum Rate and Bit Error Rate Comparison
CEQ [17]. Assuming that the elements of each user’s channel
We compare the achievable rate of the proposed MIMO BD-
matrix are identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.),
VP with (i) the sum capacity, (ii) the achievable sum rate of the
CEQ approaches the capacity of the MIMO system with
BD with the water-filling algorithms (BD-WF), and (iii) the
WF power allocation, CW F for asymptotically high SNR
sum rate of the BD with ZF pre-equalization (BD-TxZF). We
[18]. Thus we conclude that Rk,prop approaches the optimal
define MIMO BD-TxZF as the precoding system where each
capacity that the WF algorithm achieves in a single user
user exploits the ZF pre-equalization without perturbation after
MIMO system asymptotically for high SNR, and that the
BD, i.e., transmitting the power-normalized signal precoded
upper bound of achievable sum rate for the proposed MIMO
by ZF pre-equalization and block-diagonalization. Thus, the
BD-VP is given by [18]
achievable sum rate of MIMO BD-TxZF is given by [11]
⎧ ⎛ ⎞⎫
K
 K
 K ⎪
⎨ ⎪
⎬
CVBD = Rk,prop ⇒ CW F,k (for high SNR), (21)  ⎜ ρ ⎟
BD
P CT xZF = log det I Lk ×Lk + ⎝  2 I Lk ×Lk ⎠
k=1 k=1 ⎪
⎩  −1  ⎪
⎭
k=1 H eff,k 
H
⎧ ⎫ F
where CW F,k denotes the achievable rate that each user can
L −1
 K ⎨  k ⎬
approach with the WF algorithm. Note that K k=1 CW F,k is a = log 1 + ρ 2
μl ,
Qk ) ≤
specific solution of (8) with a power constraint that Tr(Q ⎩ ⎭
k=1 l=1
P and KP = PT . Consequently, assuming that each user (22)
equally uses the transmit power P , this sum rate is the same where we recall that μl is the inverse of the l-th singular value,
BD
as the achievable sum rate CW F as seen in (8). λl .

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4056
TABLE I
S YSTEM CHARACTERISTIC COMPARISON FOR THE PROPOSED SYSTEM (MIMO BD-VP), MIMO BD-T X ZF, MIMO BD-R X ZF AND MIMO BD-R X ML
Channel estimation
MIMO BD-VP No
MIMO BD-TxZF No
MIMO BD-RxZF Required
MIMO BD-RxML Required
*
This channel estimation means estimation for the effective channel at each mobile station.
**
This receiver complexity is required for each mobile station. We assume that N = Nr = Lk , and M denotes a modulation order.
Fig. 2 compares the achievable sum rate of the proposed
system with the other systems in the case of {2, 2}. From
Fig. 2, we observe that the sum rate of the proposed MIMO
BD-VP is better than that of MIMO BD-TxZF and also
approaches the sum rate of MIMO BD-WF asymptotically
for high SNR as we expected in Section III-B without any
additional coordination information and iterative updates for
implementing the precoding and decoding matrices. The sum
rate of MIMO BD-TxZF is degraded by the power normal-
ization from transmit precoding. The proposed MIMO BD-
VP exploits the perturbation as a form of power allocation to
compensate for the degradation of power normalization.
Fig. 3 shows the achievable sum rate performances ac-
cording to the number of users. The sum rate of proposed
MIMO BD-VP linearly increases as the number of transmit
antennas and the number of users increase. We also observe
that the performance gap between MIMO BD-WF and the
proposed MIMO BD-VP increases as the number of users
increases, which is because in this simulation the number of
transmit antennas increases as the number of users increases.
The performance gap between CVBD BD
P and CW F resulted from
the assumption that MIMO BD-VP uses equal power and
the same constellation for each transmit antenna. Note that
the achievable rate of proposed MIMO BD-VP approaches
the sum rate of the specific case of CW BD
F mentioned in
Section III-B.
We also compare the BER performance and diversity gain
of the proposed MIMO BD-VP and the other MIMO BD
precoding systems according to several configurations of the
receiver antennas and users under the assumption that all the
precoding systems use equal power and the same constellation
for each transmit antenna.
The other precoding systems include MIMO BD-RxZF and
MIMO BD-RxML. The MIMO BD-RxZF and the MIMO BD-
RxML precoding systems are the same as the proposed MIMO
BD-VP from the viewpoint of the usage of the nulling matrix
to remove multiuser interference. These precoding systems,
however, have ZF and ML decoders at the receiver to decode
the transmit symbol, respectively [9]. Therefore, we assume
that, for MIMO BD-RxZF and MIMO BD-RxML, the receiver
uses the coordination information or channel estimation to
give the information about the effective channel as mentioned
in Section II. In contrast, the proposed MIMO BD-VP does
not need to estimate precoded channel parameters. So the
proposed precoder is suitable for the system that only exploits
common pilot channels like 3GPP LTE standard [19], where
each receiver estimates the real channel without multiplying
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008
*
Transmitter complexity Receiver complexity **
> O(KN M ) O(N )
O(KN ω ), 2 < ω < 3 O(N )
- O(N ω ), 2 < ω < 3
- O(N M )
by the precoder.
Fig. 4 shows BER performance comparing the proposed
MIMO BD-VP with MIMO BD-RxZF, MIMO BD-RxML,
and CI-VP for 4-QAM. We assume three {Nr , K} scenarios
to observe the BER performance: {2, 2}, {2, 3}, and {3, 2}.
For CI-VP, we consider Nt = 4, Nr = 1, and K = 4.
The proposed MIMO BD-VP supports 9 dB SNR gains at
10−2 BER compared with MIMO BD-RxZF. Compared with
MIMO BD-RxML, the proposed precoding system shows the
same diversity gain, but provides less performance in SNR
gain. Note that MIMO BD-RxML requires perfect channel
estimation for decoding the transmit symbol. On one hand,
as long as perfect channel estimation is guaranteed at the
receiver, ML decoding is the optimal solution and provides
a lower bound of error rate performance compared with other
decoding algorithms. On the other hand, the proposed MIMO
BD-VP shows comparable BER performance to MIMO BD-
RxML without any channel estimation. From the viewpoint
of diversity gain, the proposed MIMO BD-VP has the same
diversity order with the ML type receiver as mentioned earlier.
In Fig. 4, we also observe that the proposed precoding system
has the same slope as MIMO BD-RxML and provides better
diversity gain than MIMO BD-RxZF. As mentioned in the
introduction, we can see that CI-VP shows better performance
than the proposed solution at the cost of high computational
complexity.
B. Complexity
In this section we evaluate the approximate complexity of
the precoding systems described in Section IV-A. It is hard to
calculate the exact complexity of the proposed MIMO BD-VP
because the perturbing algorithm used in the proposed precod-
ing system adopts a scalar design parameter τ that provides a
symmetric encoding region around every signal constellation
points (see (9) in [7]). The proposed perturbing algorithm
uses a complex version of Lk -dimensional integer-lattice least-
square problem and we assume that N = Lk = Nr . Hence,
the proposed precoder has an approximate complexity of
O(N M+α ) for each user, where M denotes a modulation
order and α is a positive value that depends on the encoding
region parameter τ . The complexity of O(N M+α ) is greater
than O(N M ) referred to as the complexity of ML decoding al-
gorithm with Lk transmit data streams. Consequently, MIMO
BD-VP has the complexity of O(KN M+α ) (> O(KN M ))
totally at the transmitter. The receive complexity of MIMO
BD-VP depends primarily on the modulo algorithm that
simply demaps a perturbed symbol to an original symbol.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 7, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008
Therefore, MIMO BD-VP has a complexity of O(N ) for each
user’s receiver.
MIMO BD-RxZF and MIMO BD-RxML have no special
encoding techniques at the transmitter. They do, however, use
the ZF and the ML decoding algorithms at the receiver, respec-
tively. Therefore the approximate complexity orders of MIMO
BD-RxZF and MIMO BD-RxML are O(N ω ) (2 < ω < 3, see
[13]) and O(N M ) for each user’s receiver, respectively. We
summarize the characteristics of the proposed MIMO BD-VP,
MIMO BD-TxZF, MIMO BD-RxZF and MIMO BD-RxML
from the viewpoints of channel estimation and transmitter-
receiver complexity in Table I.
V. C ONCLUSION
We proposed a new multiuser MIMO precoding algorithm
that combines block diagonalization with vector perturbation
(MIMO BD-VP). The proposed algorithm supports multi-
stream transmission, does not require extra coordination in-
formation, reduces the complexity of receiver, and provides
comparable diversity performance to BD with maximum like-
lihood decoding algorithm. The proposed precoding system
uses BD to remove multiuser interference and exploits the
channel inversion algorithm as pre-equalization to avoid addi-
tional coordination information under the the dimensionality
constraint. It also applies a perturbation to reduce transmit
power enhancement that results from the power normalization
when channel inversion algorithms such as zero-forcing and
minimum mean squared error algorithms are used for channel
pre-equalization. The proposed MIMO BD-VP can achieve the
sum rate approached by the block diagonalization precoding
system with the water-filling algorithm asymptotically for
high SNR without any coordination information. Through
numerical simulations, when the number of transmit antennas
and the number of users are 6 and 3, respectively, we verified
that the proposed MIMO BD-VP has at least 10 dB SNR
gain at 10−2 BER compared with the conventional BD with
zero-forcing pre-equalization at the transmitter. The proposed
MIMO BD-VP also provided 9 dB SNR gain at 10−2 BER
compared to the BD with zero-forcing decoder that assumes
perfect channel estimation and uses the zero-forcing algorithm
at the receiver. Furthermore, we observed that the proposed
system with a simple decoding structure gets the comparable
diversity gain and BER performance to the BD with an
optimum maximum likelihood decoding at the receiver.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers,
whose careful consideration of the manuscript improved the
presentation of the material.
Authorized licensed use limited to: VELLORE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Downloaded on July 28, 2009 at 06:55 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
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