A receiving antenna allocation scheme for downlink MU-MIMO-OFDM transmission

This paper proposes a novel receiving antenna allocation scheme for downlink multiuser multiple input multiple output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MU-MIMO-OFDM) transmission; an access point (AP) simultaneously transmits data frames to a combination of allocated receiving antennas on a subcarrier basis at each station (STA). The proposed scheme combines a limited channel state information (CSI) feedback sequence with a receiving antenna decision method. In the proposed scheme, each STA estimates the channel responses of all receiving antennas by using the training preamble transmitted from an AP, and then feeds the channel response of the antenna with maximum norm back to the AP when the spatial correlation value between receiving antennas is higher than a threshold. Otherwise, each STA feeds full channel responses back to the AP. This scheme decreases the amount of CSI fed back while exploiting the spatial diversity gain, and the AP’s computational complexity is also decreased regarding the antenna allocation. Moreover, the receiving antenna decision method eliminates the overhead to notify the allocated antenna information from the AP to each STA by simply comparing its own receiving antenna powers. We clarify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in our computer simulations using channel responses measured in an indoor environment. The results show that the proposed scheme maintains the channel capacity of the downlink MU-MIMO-OFDM transmission while greatly reducing the overhead and computational complexity.