Coordinated zero-forcing beamforming in multipoint MIMO networks for backhaul applications

The capacity of a multipoint MIMO wireless network is interference-limited. In order to increase the system capacity, MIMO precoding at the transmitter and decoding at the receiver can be employed so that interference among different nodes is eliminated or suppressed. In this paper, we propose precoding/decoding techniques based on an iterative zero-forcing approach. By utilizing the extra degrees of freedom provided by multiple transmit and receive antennas, this algorithm achieves good signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and fast convergence. The sum-rate capacity and convergence behavior of this algorithm are studied and the possible application to MIMO backhaul networks is discussed.