Precoded FIR and redundant V-BLAST systems for frequency-selective MIMO channels

The vertical Bell labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) system is a multi-input multioutput (MIMO) system designed to achieve good multiplexing gain. In recent literature, a precoder, which exploits channel information, has been added in the V-BLAST transmitter. This precoder forces each symbol stream to have an identical mean square error (MSE). It can be viewed as an alternative to the bit-loading method. In this paper, this precoded V-BLAST system is extended to the case of frequency-selective MIMO channels. Both the FIR and redundant types of transceivers, which use cyclic-prefixing and zero-padding, are considered. A fast algorithm for computing a cyclic-prefixing-based precoded V-BLAST transceiver is developed. Experiments show that the proposed methods with redundancy have better performance than the SVD-based system with optimal powerloading and bit loading for frequency-selective MIMO channels. The gain comes from the fact that the MSE-equalizing precoder has better bit-error rate performance than the optimal bitloading method.