A phase noise mitigation scheme for MIMO WLANs with spatially correlated and imperfectly estimated channels

Applying multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technique to OFDM-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) promises impressive high capacity and spectral efficiency compared with conventional systems. However, similar to SISO-OFDM, MIMO-OFDM suffers significant performance degradation due to the presence of phase noise. Many methods have been developed to mitigate phase noise for a single antenna system with perfect channel estimation, whereas none has been proposed for correlated MIMO-OFDM scenarios. Therefore, in this letter, by using the phase noise correlation function, a new phase noise mitigation scheme is proposed for the general M_T×M_R MIMO WLANs system with channel estimation errors. Numerical results show that, compared with conventional approaches, the proposed scheme achieves significant performance gain with high spectral efficiency, requiring few pilots, and is robust to spatial correlation and channel estimation errors, which makes it very attractive for practical applications.