Blockwise Uniform Channel Decomposition for MIMO Systems

In this paper, we investigate spatial multiplexing schemes for closed-loop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The performance of the singular value decomposition (SVD) scheme is limited by the smallest singular value. When all the subchannels are utilized, uniform channel decomposition (UCD) was recently proposed to obtain a performance gain by making subchannels have equal gains. The UCD requires a successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver, and thus it suffers from the error propagation inherent in the SIC receiver. We propose the blockwise UCD (BL-UCD) scheme which increases the minimum subchannel gain by pairing two singular values. The proposed scheme allows single-symbol decodable maximum-likelihood detection (MLD) instead of the SIC receiver. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed BL-UCD scheme outperforms the SVD scheme and the conventional UCD at full spatial multiplexing for four transmit antennas and four receive antennas by 8 dB and 5 dB, respectively.