A practical approach to improve product of energy efficiency and capacity rate in MU-MIMO systems

Abstract

Purpose The major challenges in the modern-day wireless communication systems are increased co-channel interference owing to large number of users and the increased energy consumption owing to high circuit and/or hardware power consumption. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to present a practical approach involving linear precoding, channel estimation, user selection (US) and transmit antenna selection (AS) for enhanced reliability in multiuser multiple-input multiple output (MU-MIMO) system. Design/methodology/approach The proposed technique considers systematic and optimum deployment of users and transmits antennas for each selected user which enhances the sum rate or the system capacity. The comparison of algorithms, namely, norm-based and capacity-based US is presented with its implementation with precoding techniques, namely, block-diagonalization (BD) and zero-forcing with combining (ZFC) which is used to minimize co-channel interference. In this paper, a power consumption model is proposed for energy efficiency calculation in MU-MIMO system. Also, post analysis, the variant of US and AS algorithms optimizing the performance of BD and ZFC precoding technique is proposed. Findings It is seen that the proposed MU-MIMO system with norm-based US and norm-based AS improves over existing US-based systems by 43% in terms of sum rate and 19% in terms of energy efficiency for 100 users. Originality/value It is seen that the proposed MU-MIMO system with norm-based US and norm-based AS improves over existing US-based systems by 43% in terms of sum rate and 19% in terms of energy efficiency for 100 users.