MIMO diversity combining in multiple fading environments with co-channel interference

Abstract

Cellular systems suffer from low throughput due to the presence of severe multipath fading noise environment, in addition to the additive background noise and the internal thermal receiver noise. This noisy environment is more complicated in small pico- and femto-cell structures and further hampers the performance of the system. In this project, we proposed multiple transmitter diversity by using OFDM modulation, and multiple receiver diversity by combining the received OFDM signal over an array of antennas using optimal maximal ratio combining based-detector. Under this proposed scheme, an NxN multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) channel is established by the user equipment and the base station, and channel fading parameter estimation is required. Using Matlab simulation, we demonstrated that our system was able to combat multiplicative fading noise more efficiently than the classically used single transceiver over a single-inputsingle-output (SISO) channel, and resulted in a much higher throughput (speed in bits per second) for the same bit error rate specified by the QoS (quality of service) provisions of classical SISO cellular systems.