An Empirical Study of the Achievable Rates of Several Indoor Network-MIMO Techniques

This paper presents an empirical study of the achievable data rates of network multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques including zero-forcing (ZF), zero-forcing dirty paper coding (ZF-DPC) and dirty paper coding (DPC) using actual 4-by-4 indoor wireless channel measurements at 3.5 GHz. Their performances are contrasted with those of conventional techniques, in which either the base stations are not coordinated (NC), or their interference is avoided using frequency division (FD) multiplexing. The measurements were taken in aisle-to-office and large unobstructed hall scenarios. The study of these results reveals that, at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), DPC and ZF-DPC can yield more than a three-fold increase in attainable data rates when compared to NC and FD. The gains obtained using ZF are smaller, but still significant. At low SNRs the system is noise-(rather than interference-) limited, and only DPC exhibits gains. The evaluations in this paper also show that collaborative systems such as DPC can benefit from interference-prone environments to yield increased transmission capacity. With regard to the propagation channel, the classical log-normal plus Rayleigh/Ricean fading model, with parameters fitted to the scenario type, was found to be good at predicting the statistics of the achievable data rates of all the strategies considered.