Channel Estimation and Precoding in– Closed-Loop Distributed Multi-Antenna Systems

Today’s wireless cellular systems are limited by inter-cell interference. Coordinated multi-point transmission and reception (CoMP) is a promising approach to cope with this problem. Here, multiple base stations act as a distributed antenna system, exchanging coordination information and potentially user data via backhaul in order to reduce this interference, increasing spectral efficiency and generating a more homogeneous user experience throughout the entire cell, especially at the currently weak cell edges. This dissertation aims at enabling coordinated multi-point systems by dealing with its current realization challenges. Accurate channel knowledge is required both at transmitter and receiver side in order to realize the CoMP gains. Hence, practical channel estimation algorithms are investigated and developed in order to get as accurate channel knowledge as possible with manageable computational complexity under realistic system operation points. Especially the often neglected obtainment of statistical parameter knowledge is included here, which is challenging under dynamic user scheduling conditions. A multi-user multi-cell channel estimator is provided which, even for larger number of coordinated cells, can get receiver performance fairly close to performance with perfect channel knowledge. Furthermore, different downlink precoding and receive combining strategies are compared against each other under imperfect channel knowledge. As the number of coordinated cells the cluster size is limited in practice, mobiles at cluster edges suffer from inter-cluster interference. A novel patented precoding and control signaling scheme is introduced in order to deal with the inter-cluster interference.