Minimum distance based precoder design for general MIMO systems using Gram matrix

Assuming perfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter and receiver, the optimization problem of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance between two received signals by a linear precoder is considered for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with arbitrary dimensions and arbitrary-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) input. A general precoding framework is first presented based on the Gram matrix, which is shown for 2-dimensional (2-D) and 3-dimensional (3D) MIMO systems when employing the ellipse expanding method (EEM). An extended precoder for high-dimensional MIMO system is proposed following the precoding framework, where the Gram matrix for high-dimensional precoding matrix can be generated through those chosen from 2-D and 3-D results in association with a peimutation matrix. A complexity-reduced maximum likelihood detector is also obtained according to the special structure of the proposed precoder. The analytical and numerical results indicate that the proposed precoder outperforms the other precoding schemes in terms of both minimum distance and bit error rate (BER).