Partial channel overlay in moderate-scale MIMO systems using WH precoded OFDM

In this paper, we propose a multi-user orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission scheme with partial channel reusing between users, suitable for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with not-so-large antenna arrays. The spectrum efficiency is improved at the price of adding multiuser interference (MUI) which can be overcome by the multiplexing gain of MIMO. In addition, we propose to employ the spread spectrum OFDM (SS-OFDM) modulation with the Walsh-Hadamard (WH) codebook for such a multi-user system to further mitigate the MUI. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels is derived analytically and then verified through Monte-Carlo simulations. Moreover, the proposed SS-OFDM system with partial bandwidth reuse is compared with the OFDM-based solution in a moderate-scale MIMO system with equal gain combining (EGC) precoding. It is shown that the proposed SS-OFDM MIMO system outperforms the classical OFDM approach in frequency-selective fading channels when the number of transmit antennas remains moderate.