Evaluation of Precoder Designs Using Measured MIMO Channels

Abstract: MIMO transceiver designs rely mainly on the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and receiver sides of a communication link. In most  practical scenarios due to the fast fading channels, the transmitter side can only have statistical (or long-term) information about the channel. This thesis investigates and compares five MIMO transceiver designs over a measured 8x4 MIMO channel obtained from ERICSSON in terms of Bit-Error-Rate. Three of the algorithms use statistical channel information (CSI) at the transmitter side and instantaneous channel information at the receiver side, one of the algorithms uses instantaneous channel information at both the transmitter and receiver sides, and one algorithm uses no channel information at the transmitter and instantaneous channel information at the receiver side. The main target of this study is a recently long-term precoder design proposed in [1] which previously has showed good performance compared to other long-term precoder designs on a simulated channel. In the evaluation of the precoder designs on the measured MIMO channel, the precoder in [1] outperformed others long-term precoders and performed near to performance the short-term precoder in [5] on the slow and line-of-sight (LOS) channels. On the fast channels the long-term precoder in [1] works better than the long-term precoders but relatively far from the performance of the short-term precoder.