Constant envelope precoding for power-efficient downlink wireless communication in multi-user MIMO systems using large antenna arrays

We consider downlink cellular multi-user communication between a base station (BS) having N antennas and M single-antenna users, i.e., an N × M Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC). Under an average only total transmit power constraint (APC), large antenna arrays at the BS (having tens to a few hundred antennas) have been recently shown to achieve remarkable multi-user interference (MUI) suppression with simple precoding techniques. However, building large arrays in practice, would require cheap/power-efficient Radio-Frequency (RF) electronic components. The type of transmitted signal that facilitates the use of most power-efficient RF components is a constant envelope (CE) signal (i.e., the amplitude of the signal transmitted from each antenna is constant for every channel use and every channel realization). Under certain mild channel conditions (including i.i.d. fading), we analytically show that, even under the stringent per-antenna CE transmission constraint (compared to APC), MUI suppression can still be achieved with large antenna arrays. Our analysis also reveals that, with a fixed M and increasing N, the total transmitted power can be reduced while maintaining a constant signal-to-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) level at each user. We also propose a novel low-complexity CE precoding scheme, using which, we confirm our analytical observations for the i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel, through Monte-Carlo simulations. Simulation of the information sum-rate under the per-antenna CE constraint, shows that, for a fixed M and a fixed desired sum-rate, the required total transmit power decreases linearly with increasing N, i.e., an O(N) array power gain. Also, in terms of the total transmit power required to achieve a fixed desired information sum-rate, despite the stringent per-antenna CE constraint, the proposed CE precoding scheme performs close to the GBC sum-capacity (under APC) achieving scheme.