Successive Interference Cancellation for SC/FDE-MIMO Systems

Several efforts are currently underway in investigating multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. MIMO technology promises high data rate wireless communications and/or the potentiality of exploiting transmit and receive diversity schemes. For WLAN (wireless local area networks) scenarios most investigations focus on OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) transmission. In this paper we discuss spatial multiplexing in conjunction with optimal matched filtering and MMSE-equalization for SC/FDE (single carrier transmission with frequency domain equalization), a single carrier technology closely related to OFDM due to its frequency domain signal processing characteristics. We show that our MMSE equalizer derived in S. Reinhardt et al. (2006) can be further optimized by combining it with successive interference cancellation known from multiuser detection, which yields a novel structure for MIMO-SC/FDE systems similar to VBLAST (G.D. Golden et al., 1999), but adapted to SC/FDE and suited for transmission over frequency selective fading channels