Multiuser antenna partitioning for cellular MIMO-CDMA systems

Abstract

Improving the capacity of code-division-multiple-access (CDMA) systems through advanced signal processing has been an area of intensive research for many years, with limited success. Multiantenna technologies called multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) are an obvious candidate to increase, particularly, downlink capacity. Nearly all research on MIMO-CDMA, however, has focused on increasing the throughput achieved per user, rather than increasing the number of supportable users, which is still the most important design goal in QoS-constrained voice systems. In this paper, we consider the downlink of a heavily loaded multicell CDMA system with multiple transmit and receive antennas. Straightforward application of the known MIMO techniques to such a system does not substantially increase the number of supportable users. To overcome this, a novel MIMO-CDMA system design based on user partitioning is developed, in which each user is assigned to a single transmit antenna either without regard to channel knowledge (static) or based on antenna-selection feedback bits (dynamic). These proposed multiuser-antenna-partitioning techniques have a minimal increase in complexity and would require only small changes to existing CDMA standards. The outage probability and capacity of the proposed systems are derived, and it is shown that, particularly, the dynamic partitioning scheme has a large gain over both the conventional CDMA and the static MIMO-CDMA scheme. This gain can be credited to multiuser antenna selection diversity. Unlike prior research, the multiuser antenna selection diversity gain is achieved without the typical expense of a loss in spatial multiplexing gain. Index Terms-Antenna partitioning, code division multiple access (CDMA), multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, outage capacity.