Equal gain transmission in multiple-input multiple-output wireless systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems are of interest due to their ability to provide substantial gains in capacity and quality. This paper proposes equal gain transmission (EGT) to provide diversity advantage in MIMO systems experiencing Rayleigh fading. The applications of EGT with selection diversity combining, equal gain combining, and maximum ratio combining are addressed. It is proven that systems using EGT with any of these combining schemes achieve full diversity order when transmitting over a memoryless, flat-fading Rayleigh matrix channel with independent entries. Since, in practice, full channel knowledge at the transmitter is difficult to realize, a quantized version of EGT is proposed. An algorithm to construct a beamforming vector codebook that guarantees full diversity order is presented. Monte–Carlo simulation comparisons with various beamforming and combining systems illustrate the performance as a function of quantization.