Comparison of downlink multi-user multiple input multiple output schemes in wireless communication systems

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) processing techniques are of interest for the next generation wireless communication systems due to their potential ability to dramatically improve the system capacity. There have been existed several multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmit schemes such as zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC), and zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF). In this paper, we analysis and compare the dynamic transmission schemes based on TDMA and SDMA under perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI). The system throughput (sum data rate), the optimal user number that can be supported are evaluated under perfect CSI by computer simulations. The effect of imperfect CSI on the throughput of TDMA and SDMA is also investigated. The results show that under perfect channel state information at both transmitter and receiver, the SDMA schemes can achieve a larger throughput than the TDMA scheme because SDMA can fully explore the multiuser diversity by transmitting to the optimal set of users. In contrast, the results show that the system performance of SDMA scheme is sensitive to the channel error.