Optimal Bit Loading for MIMO Systems with Decision Feedback Detection

This paper considers the joint design of bit loading, precoding and receive filters for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital communication system employing decision feedback (DF) detection at the receiver. Both the transmitter as well as the receiver are assumed to know the channel matrix perfectly. It is well known that, for linear MIMO transceivers, a diagonal transmission (i.e., orthogonalization of the matrix channel) is optimal for some criteria. Surprisingly, it was shown five years ago that for the family of Schur-convex functions an additional rotation of the symbols is necessary. However, if the bit loading is optimized jointly with the linear transceiver, then the rotation is unnecessary. Similarly, for DF MIMO transceivers, a rotation of the symbols is sometimes needed. The main result of this paper shows that for a DF MIMO transceiver where the bit loading is jointly optimized with the transceiver filters, the rotation of the symbols becomes unnecessary and, consequently, also the DF part of the receiver is not required.