ELEC E7210: Communication

Theory

Lecture 11: MIMO Systems and

Space-time Communications
 Overview of the last lecture

◘ MIMO systems
-parallel decomposition;
- beamforming;
- MIMO channel capacity
 MIMO

• Key building block for next generation.

• Are able to increase significantly data rates

• Both Tx and Rx diversity are exploited more reliable

communications

• Multi-antenna signals can be jointly processed/combined

increase of the system integrity or/and throughput
 MIMO
• Significant increase of both the system capacity and spectral efficiency;
capacity of wireless link increases linearly with increasing

N  minN t , N r 

• Data rate can be increased by spatial multiplexing without consuming

more frequency resources and without increasing the total transmit
power

• Dramatic reduction of the effects of fading due to the increased diversity

(especially is beneficial when the different channels fade independently)
 MIMO CHANNEL
• Condition Number —is defined as a ratio of the maximum
and minimum eigenvalues of the MIMO channel matrix HH*.

• Large capacity gains from spatial multiplexing operation in

MIMO wireless systems is possible when the statistical
distributions of condition numbers have mostly low values.

• LOS conditions often create undesirable MIMO matrix

conditions (i.e., high condition numbers) that can be
mitigated using dual-polarized antennas.
 Space-time coding (1)
• The multipath wireless channel is capable of enormous
capacities, provided that the multipath scattering is sufficiently
rich and is properly exploited through the use of an appropriate
processing architecture
• Closed-loop MIMO and open-loop MIMO

• Transmission schemes that do not require CSI at the Tx may

exploit the spatial dimension by introducing coding on the
spatial domain: S-T coding

• Codewords X i  are n  L

block length
matrices
 Space-time coding (2)
• Increases redundancy over space and time, as each antenna
transmits a differently encoded fully redundant version of the
same signal.

• The ML detector is optimal

• ST codes were originally developed in the form of STTCs;

multidimensional Viterbi algorithm for decoding.

• STTCs can provide diversity equal to n and coding gain

depending on the complexity of the code without loss in
bandwidth efficiency.
 Space-time coding (3)
• STBCs offer the same diversity as STTCs, combines all the copies of the
received signal in an optimal way.

• STBCs are often preferred over STTCs, as their decoding is simpler.

• Alamouti STBCs for 2 Tx antennas – in 3G standards

• STC assume perfect CSI at the receiver.

• Unitary and differential space-time coding has been proposed , which does
not require CSI [Unitary space-time modulation for multiple-antenna
communications in Rayleigh flat fading,” IEEE Trans. Info. Theory,
• vol. 46, no. 2, Mar. 2000, pp. 543–64].
 Space-Time Processing (1)
• The optimal decoding complexity is exponential
in the number of antennas.

• Some of the approaches treat the transmission

from each antenna as an independent user
using conventional scalar codes in conjunction
with multiuser detection techniques at the Rx
(layered ST codes).
 Space-Time Processing (2)

• Layered ST architectures exploit the spatial

multiplexing gain by sending independently
encoded data streams in diagonal layers (D-
BLAST)
• or in horizontal layers (V-BLAST)
 Space-time processing (3)
• D-BLAST - a diagonally layered coding structure in which
code blocks are dispersed across diagonals in space-time.
Space-time processing (4)
 Space-time processing (5)
• redundancy between the substreams is introduced through the
use of specialized inter-substream block coding.

• In an independent Rayleigh scattering environment, this

algorithm leads to theoretical rates which grow linearly with the
number of antennas (number of Tx antennas = number of Rx
antennas ), and
the rates approach 90% of Shannon capacity.
- Implementation complexity
 Space-time processing (6)
• V-BLAST
• The encoding process is a demultiplex operation followed by
independent bit-to-symbol mapping of each substream no
inter-substream coding (conventional coding of the individual
substreams may be applied).

• No explicit orthogonalization of the transmitted signals is

imposed by the transmit structure at all.

• Instead, the propagation environment itself is exploited to

achieve the signal decorrelation necessary to separate the co-
channel signals.
 Space-time processing (7)
• Block-diagram
 Space-time processing (8)
• The received signal
y  Hx  N

• The Rx must demultiplex the spatial channels: ZF (matrix inversion and

the poor performance if the channel matrix is ill conditioned); MMSE; ML

• Symbol cancellation: interference from already-detected components of

x is subtracted out from the received signal vector a modified
received vector in which fewer interferers are present ( ~ DFE)
 MIMO Rx (1)
• The ML detection is optimal
2
yˆ  arg min
 y  Hx
xX

• Solving is impractical and exhaustive for high transmission rates, and the
complexity grows exponentially with the number of antennas

A solution: SD

SD solves this problem by searching for the closest point among all lattice
points y that lie inside a sphere centered around the received vector
and of radius d

• The algorithm runs recursively until all lattice points inside the sphere are
found
MIMO Rx (2)
 Diversity versus multiplexing
(a fundamental tradeoff in multiple
antenna channels)
• Multiple antennas can be used to increase diversity
to combat channel fading.

• By sending signals carrying the same information

through different paths, multiple independently faded
replicas of the data symbol can be obtained at the
Rx more reliable reception is achieved.
 Diversity versus multiplexing (2)

• A slow Rayleigh fading environment with 1 transmit and m

receive antennas, the transmitted signal passes through m

different propagation paths

• If the fading is independent across antenna pairs, a maximal

diversity gain (advantage) of m can be achieved: the average
m
error probability can be made to decay like 1 / SNR at high
SNR, in contrast to 1 / SNR for the single antenna fading
channel.
 Diversity versus multiplexing (3)
•

• In MIMO systems, the underlying idea is still averaging over

multiple path gains (fading coefficients) to increase the
reliability.

• In a system with n transmit and m receive antennas,

assuming the path gains between individual antenna pairs are
i.i.d. Rayleigh faded, the maximal diversity gain is mn, which is
the total number of fading gains that one can average over.
 Diversity versus multiplexing (4)
• A MIMO channel can be beneficial through
increasing the degrees of freedom available for
communication.

• If, e.g., the path gains between individual Tx-Rx

antenna pairs fade independently, the channel matrix
is well-conditioned with high probability, then
multiple parallel spatial channels are created
by transmitting independent information in parallel
through the spatial channels, the data
rate can be increased, i.e. spatial multiplexing
(e.g. BLAST scheme exploits this phenomenon)
 Diversity versus multiplexing (5)
• A MIMO system can provide two types of gains: diversity gain and spatial
multiplexing gain.
• Most of current research focuses on designing schemes to extract either
maximal diversity gain or maximal spatial multiplexing gain.

• There are also schemes, which switch between the two modes, depending on the
instantaneous channel condition

• Maximizing one type of gain may not necessarily maximize the other. For
example, the coding structure from the orthogonal designs [V. Tarokh et al,
“Space-time block code from orthogonal designs,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory,
vol. 45, pp. 1456–67, July 1999.], while achieving
• the full diversity gain, reduces the achievable spatial multiplexing gain .

• Each of the two design goals addresses only one aspect of the problem, a
concrete design depends on the application
 Diversity versus multiplexing (6)

• It has been proven [L. Zheng D. Tse:”Diversity and

Multiplexing: A Fundamental Tradeoff in Multiple Antenna
Channels”] that

• given a MIMO channel, both gains can be simultaneously

obtained, but there is a fundamental tradeoff between how
much of each type of gain any coding scheme can extract:
higher spatial multiplexing gain comes at the price of
sacrificing diversity.

log Pe ( SNR ) R(SNR)

lim  d lim r
SNR  log SNR SNR  log SNR
 Diversity versus multiplexing (7)
• The i.i.d. Rayleigh flat fading channel.

• Consider a slow fading environment in which the

channel gain is random but remains constant for a
duration of L symbols.

• If L  n  m  1 , the optimal diversity gain d * r 

achievable by any coding scheme of block length L
and multiplexing gain r (r integer) is precisely
d * r   n  r m  r 
 Diversity versus multiplexing (8)
• May be interpreted as : out of the total resource of n Tx and m Rx
antennas, it is as though r Tx and r Rx antennas were used for multiplexing
and the remaining (n-r ) Tx and (m-r )Rx antennas provided the diversity.

• By adding 1 Tx and 1 Rx antenna, the spatial multiplexing gain can be

increased by one while maintaining the same diversity level.

• The optimal tradeoff does not depend on L as long as

L  n  m 1 ;

no more diversity gain can be extracted by coding over block lengths greater
than n  m  1 than using a block length equal to n  m  1
Diversity versus multiplexing (8)
 Diversity versus multiplexing (9)

R. W. Health et al, Switching between diversity and

multiplexing in MIMO systems, IEEE Trans. Commun., June
2005.
 MIMO Rx (3): FS channels
• Similarly to SISO, MIMO channels can be frequency
selective

• Necessity of the equalizer

 Frequency-selective MIMO
channels
• Equalization over both space and time
Complexity

MIMO eq. problem SISO eq. problem

MIMO+multicarrier modulation
(MIMO-OFDM)
 MIMO OFDM (1)
• OFDM is chosen over a single-carrier solution
due to :
• lower complexity of equalizers for high delay
spread channels or high data rates;

• efficient implementation over IDFT and DFT

• high flexibility in adaptive systems

 MIMO OFDM (2)
- At the receiver, FFT reduces the channel response into a
multiplicative constant on a tone-by-tone basis.

-With MIMO, the channel response becomes a matrix. Since

each tone can be equalized independently,
the complexity of space-time equalizers is avoided.

- Multipath remains an advantage for a MIMO-OFDM system

since frequency selectivity caused by multipath improves the rank
distribution of the channel matrices across frequency tones,
thereby increasing capacity
 Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM (3)
• Achievement of this full diversity requires that the information
symbols be carefully spread over the tones as well as over Tx
antennas.

• A space-frequency code (a space–time-frequency code) is a

strategy for mapping information symbols to antennas and
tones as a means for extracting both spatial and frequency
diversity.
 Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM (4)
• Space-frequency codes based directly on space–time
codes (with time reinterpreted as frequency) have been
proposed but they fail to exploit the frequency diversity of a
frequency-selective fading MIMO channel.

• A method for transforming any full-diversity space–time code

into a full-diversity space-frequency code has recently been
proposed.
W. Su et al, “Full-rate full-diversity space-frequency codes with optimum
coding advantage,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, Jan. 2005.
• The design of space-frequency and space–time-frequency
codes –an active research area.
 Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM (5)
• A. Multicarrier Delay Diversity Modulation

• Delay diversity was the first transmit diversity approach for flat-
fading MIMO channels. Multiple transmit antennas send
delayed copies of same signal, and
MLSE or DFE is used at the receiver to estimate the transmitted
sequence.
Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM
(6)
 Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM
(7)
• B. Closed-Loop MIMO-OFDM
• A closed-loop MIMO transmitter has knowledge of the channel,
allowing it to perform an optimal form of pre-compensation

• A closed-loop MIMO-OFDM system can use beamforming on

a tone-by-tone basis to transform a frequency-selecting MIMO
channel into a collection of M parallel subchannels

M  minN t , N r 
Space-time coding for MIMO-OFDM (8)