Wireless Communications with MIMO Systems: Analysis and Practice

Abstract

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems using multiple transmit and receive antennas are widely considered as the vital breakthrough that will allow future wireless systems to achieve higher date rates and link reliability with limited bandwidth and power resources. In this dissertation, we address four interesting topics in the wireless MIMO systems, in both point-to-point and multiuser environments. First, in a point-to-point MIMO spatial diversity system, usually the probability distribution function (PDF) of the received SNR is rather involved, which leads to the difficulty in analyzing the average symbol error rate (SER). We provide a succinct result at the high SNR region. Second, in point-to-point wireless MIMO communications, in order to protect the transmitted data against random channel impairment, we consider the problem of link adaptation, including rate adaptation and power control to improve the system performance and guarantee certain quality of service. Third, in a multiuser MIMO wireless network, there is another form of diversity called multiuser diversity which can be exploited to increase the system throughput. By analyzing the scheduling gain (defined as the rate difference between the opportunistic scheduling and round-robin scheduling scheme), we provide a complete analysis on the interaction between the spatial diversity and multiuser diversity. Fourth, in a multiuser MIMO wireless network, we propose a crosslayer-based scheduling scheme that exploits Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP) at the physical (PHY) layer to reduce the multiuser scheduling burden at the medium access control (MAC) layer. Compared with some existing scheduling schemes, the proposed scheme greatly reduces the scheduling complexity while simultaneously improves overall system performance.