On precoding MIMO-FBMC with imperfect channel state information at the transmitter

This paper studies the impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI) due to limited feedback link on the performance of multi-user MIMO system using filter bank based multicarrier (FBMC) modulation. The system is composed of a transmitter performing Zero Forcing (ZF) precoding and single antenna receivers applying decoding techniques. Simulation-based results show that except when the number of users is less than the number of transmit antennas, the BER performance and capacity of FBMC and OFDM modulation are the same. These results are theoretically justified due to the distribution of the interfering terms. As in OFDM, depending on the number of interferers, for a given BER performance target, the required number of feedback bits per channel vector can be rather high. FBMC becomes attractive not only because it relaxes the synchronization with respect to OFDM, but also because it achieves the same performance results as OFDM for multi-user MIMO precoding even in the case of imperfect CSI at the transmitter.