MMSE Beamforming for SC-FDMA Transmission over MIMO ISI Channels

We consider transmit beamforming for single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) transmission over frequency-selective multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The beamforming filters are optimized for minimization of the sum of the mean-squared errors (MSEs) of the transmitted data streams after MIMO minimum mean-squared error linear equalization (MMSE-LE), and for minimization of the product of the MSEs after MIMO MMSE decision-feedback equalization (MMSE-DFE), respectively. We prove that for SC-FDMA transmission in both cases eigenbeamforming, diagonalizing the overall channel, together with a nonuniform power distribution is the optimum beamforming strategy. The optimum power allocation derived for MMSE-LE is similar in spirit to classical results for the optimum continuous-time transmit filter for linear modulation formats obtained by Berger/Tufts and Yang/Roy, whereas for MMSE-DFE the capacity achieving waterfilling strategy well known from conventional single-carrier transmission schemes is obtained. Moreover, we present a modification of the beamformer design to mitigate an increase of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) which is in general associated with beamforming. Simulation results demonstrate the high performance of the proposed beamforming algorithms.