Antenna partitioning for multiuser MIMO-CDMA

Improving downlink CDMA capacity has been an area of intensive research for the past decade, especially as the downlink has become the capacity limiting link. Multi-antenna technologies are an obvious candidate for increasing the downlink capacity, but successfully decoding spatially multiplexed signals is very challenging in an interference-limited environment, such as that of CDMA cellular systems. In this paper, a simple and novel MIMO-CDMA system design is developed, in which users are assigned to a transmit antenna either without regard to channel knowledge (static) or based on antenna selection feedback bits (dynamic). These proposed antenna partitioning techniques have a minimal increase in complexity and require only small changes to existing CDMA standards. The outage probability and capacity of the proposed systems are derived and it is shown that they outperform conventional CDMA systems regardless of the number of antennas or antenna partitioning technique.