Minimum Distance Based Precoder for MIMO-OFDM Systems Using a 16-QAM Modulation

A precoder based on the exact optimization of the minimum Euclidean distance d_min between signal points at the receiver side is proposed for MIMO-OFDM systems using a 16-QAM modulation. Assuming that channel state information (CSI) can be made available at the transmitter, the channel is diagonalized and a precoder can be derived. A numerical approach shows that the precoder design depends on the channel characteristics, leading to 8 different precoder expressions. Comparisons with maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) strategy and other precoders based on criteria, such as water-filling (WF), minimum mean square error (MMSE), and maximization of the minimum singular value of the global channel matrix, are performed to illustrate the significant bit-error-rate (BER) improvement of the proposed precoder. In order to make its implementation easier, it is shown that it can be expressed by only two ways without significant performance degradation.