Abstract: In this paper we introduce a novel linear precoding technique. It was previously reported in the literature that when the user terminals are equipped with one antenna, minimum mean-squared-error (MMSE) in combination with successive interference cancellation is optimum on the uplink, while MMSE precoding in combination with Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) is optimum on the downlink. The linear precoding technique introduced in this paper is based on the modified MSE criterion. It can serve the users that are equipped with arbitrary number of antennas with only limitation that the total number of users in the system has to be less than or equal to the rank of the combined multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel matrix of all users. It was shown in the simulations that it extracts very high diversity gain and at low signal-to-noise ratios, when the total number of antennas at the user terminals is greater than the number of antennas at the base station, it approaches the maximum sum rate capacity of the broadcast channel. The technique introduced in this paper is favorable for practical implementation since it requires by an order of magnitude less operations than the techniques based on the singular value decomposition.
Keywords: MIMO systems, Multi-user MIMO, SDMA, transmit signal processing.