A Comparison between Unitary and Non-Unitary Precoder Design for MIMO Channels with MMSE Detection and Limited Feedback

This work studies the design of linear precoder codebooks for NxM MIMO channels with MMSE detection at the receiver. A natural split of precoder-design is unitary precoding and non-unitary precoding. Unitary precoding is only performing rotation of the data in a way beneficial for the channel. Non-unitary precoding additionally also uses power-loading to further improve the performance. Somewhat surprisingly, unitary precoding facilitates a performance boosting by a re-enumeration of the antenna elements at the receiver side that can not be accomodated in the non-unitary precoding setting. This operation leads to substantial performance gains. The question investigated in this paper is whether this re-enumeration can compensate for the lack of power-loading. The outcome is that for small precoder codebooks, unitary precoding performs as good as non-unitary, while for larger codebooks non-unitary precoding outperforms unitary precoding.