Symbol Error Rate Minimization Precoding for Interference Exploitation

This paper investigates a new beamforming approach for interference exploitation, which has recently attracted interest as an alternative to conventional interference-avoidance beamforming for the downlink of multiple-input multiple-output systems. Contrary to existing interference exploitation approaches that focus on signal-to-noise ratio performance, we adopt an approach based on the detection region of the signal constellation. Focusing on quality of service, we then formulate the optimization for minimizing the error probability (EP) for the worst user, subject to power constraints. We do this by employing the knowledge of channel state information at the transmitter, along with all downlink users’ data that are readily available at the base station during downlink transmission. In this context, we also show that the detection-region-based beamforming and the worst user EP downlink beamforming are equivalent problems. Finally, we further propose a sum EPs approach and provide an analytic bound of average symbol error rate performance. Our simulations verify that the proposed techniques provide significantly improved performance over conventional downlink beamforming techniques.