Linear MIMO precoding in jointly-correlated fading multiple access channels with finite alphabet signaling

In this paper, we investigate the design of linear precoders for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple access channels (MAC). We assume that statistical channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitters and consider the problem under the practical finite alphabet input assumption. First, we derive an asymptotic (in the large-system limit) weighted sum rate (WSR) expression for the MIMO MAC with finite alphabet inputs and general jointly-correlated fading. Subsequently, we obtain necessary conditions for linear precoders maximizing the asymptotic WSR and propose an iterative algorithm for determining the precoders of all users. In the proposed algorithm, the search space of each user for designing the precoding matrices is its own modulation set. This significantly reduces the dimension of the search space for finding the precoding matrices of all users compared to the conventional precoding design for the MIMO MAC with finite alphabet inputs, where the search space is the combination of the modulation sets of all users. As a result, the proposed algorithm decreases the computational complexity for MIMO MAC precoding design with finite alphabet inputs by several orders of magnitude. Simulation results for finite alphabet signalling indicate that the proposed iterative algorithm achieves significant performance gains over existing precoder designs, including the precoder design based on the Gaussian input assumption, in terms of both the sum rate and the coded bit error rate.