Cooperative Multi-User MIMO Wireless Systems Employing Precoding and Beamforming

Interference among multiple base stations that co-exist in the same location limits the capacity of wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a method to design a spectrally efficient cooperative downlink transmission scheme employing precoding and beamforming for multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The algorithm eliminates the interference and achieves symbol error rate (SER) fairness among different users. To eliminate the interference, Tomlinson Harashima precoding (THP) is used to cancel part of the interference while the transmit-receive antenna weights are chosen to cancel the remaining interference. A new novel iterative method is applied to generate the transmit-receive antenna weights. To achieve SER fairness among different users and further improve the performance of multi-user MIMO systems, we develop algorithms that provide equal signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) across all users. The users are also ordered so that the minimum SINR for each user is maximized. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme considerably outperforms existing cooperative transmission schemes in terms of the SER performance and complexity and approaches an interference free performance under the same configuration.