Design of reduced complexity feedback precoding for MIMO‐OFDM

Beamforming technique is applied to significantly increase the performance of a MIMO system, if the channel information (CI) of the communication system is available at the transmitter. For the transmitter to obtain the entire CI, however, a considerable reverse‐link bandwidth is required. To save the bandwidth, a limited‐rate closed‐loop system, therefore, uses a predetermined codebook which is derived from the CI. The codebook consists of a finite number of precoders out of which the index of the best one is transmitted from the receiver to the transmitter using only a few bits saving substantial bandwidth. However, the amount of bits that need to be fed back can still be significantly large for MIMO‐OFDM systems when the precoding matrix index (PMI) for each subcarrier should be transmitted. Such per‐subcarrier precoding scheme has high feedback overhead and also incurs huge computational cost to determine the best PMI for each subcarrier. We, therefore, propose a per‐band precoding scheme that precodes a band (group) of subcarriers by only one precoder. More importantly, we develop, for the proposed per‐band scheme, reduced‐complexity precoding selection methods that lead to the design of efficient receivers. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is investigated through computer simulations. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.