Performance Evaluation of Multiuser MIMO E-SDM Systems in Time-Varying Fading Environments

In this paper, the performance of multiuser MIMO E-SDM systems in downlink transmission is evaluated in both uncorrelated and correlated time-varying fading environments. In the ideal case, using the block diagonalization scheme, inter-user interference can be completely eliminated at each user; and using the E-SDM technique for each user, optimal resource allocation can be achieved, and spatially orthogonal substreams can be obtained. Therefore, a combination of the block diagonalization scheme and the E-SDM technique applied to multiuser MIMO systems gives very good results. In realistic environments, however, due to the dynamic nature of the channel and processing delay at both the transmitter and the receiver, the channel change during the delay may cause inter-user interference even if the BD scheme is used. In addition, the change may also result in large inter-substream interference and prevent optimal resource allocation from being achieved. As a result, system performance may be degraded seriously. To overcome the problem, we propose a method of channel extrapolation to compensate for the channel change. Applying our proposed method, simulation results show that much better system performance can be obtained than the conventional case. Moreover, it also shows that the system performance in the correlated fading environments is much dependent on the antenna configuration and the angle spread from the base station to scatterers.