Joint Combiner and Precoding in MU-MIMO Downlink Systems with Limited Feedback

In this paper, we consider practical multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems where each user has multiple receive antennas and limited channel feedback is available at the base station (BS). The joint combiner and precoding scheme for downlink transmission is proposed, in which we consider the joint use of the receive antenna combiner at each user and precoding at the BS. In the proposed scheme, each user independently chooses the codeword as its preferred-beam vector from the predefined codebook, which maximizes the effective channel gain after the receive antenna combiner. Utilizing the received feedback from users, the BS can easily construct the precoding matrix by zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) criterion. In addition, a user selection algorithm is provided to select served users, when the number of users exceeds the number of transmit antennas. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme improves the sum-rate performance of MU-MIMO downlink systems.