On the Feasibility of Precoded Single User MIMO for LTE-A Uplink

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is currently specifying the system requirements for Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A), having as a target peak data rates of 1 Gbit/s in local areas and 100 Mbit/s in wide areas. To meet these ambitious requirements for the uplink, multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques are expected to be deployed. In this paper, several channel-aware MIMO precoding techniques are presented. Specifically, precoded single user spatial multiplexing for both Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiplexing (SCFDM) is studied, and its feasibility in a LTE-A uplink system is discussed. Particular emphasis is given to the limited feedback precoding, where a codebook generation method based on the Lloyd algorithm is proposed. Results show that, when full channel knowledge is available at both the transmitter and the receiver, precoding leads to a spectral efficiency gain up to 4 dB over open loop transmission; furthermore, OFDM slightly outperforms SC-FDM because of its higher robustness to the noise. Limited feedback precoding has been shown to be effective and consistently robust to the subcarrier grouping in a urban micro scenario. However, the performance is severely degraded in the blind precoding case, where transmitter and receiver compute the precoding matrix independently, due to the high sensitivity to the delay. Finally, the precoding operation over the SCFDM signal is shown to increase its Peak to Average Power Ratio (PAPR), thus reducing its advantage with respect to OFDM.