Interference-free SDMA for FBMC-OQAM

Filter-bank multi-carrier (FBMC) modulations have recently been considered for the emerging wireless communication systems as a means to improve the utilization of the physical resources and the robustness to channel time variations. FBMC divides the overall frequency channel in a set of subchannels of bandwidth proportionally decreasing with the number of subchannels. If the number of subchannels is high enough, the bandwidth of each subchannel is small enough to assume that it is approximately flat. On the other hand, space-division multiple access (SDMA) is a recognized technique to support multiple access in the downlink of a multi-user system. The user signals are precoded at the base station equipped with multiple antennas to separate the users in the spatial domain. The application of SDMA to FBMC is unfortunately difficult when the channel is too frequency selective (or when the number of subchannels to too small) to assume flat subchannels. In that case, the system suffers from inter-symbol and inter-subchannel interference, besides the multi-user interference inherent to SDMA. State-of-the art solutions simply neglect the inter-symbol/subchannel interference. This article proposes a new SDMA precoder for FBMC capable of mitigating the three sources of interference. It is constructed per subchannel in order to keep an acceptable complexity and has the structure of a filter applied on each subchannel and its neighbors at twice the symbol rate. Numerical results demonstrate that the precoder can get rid of all the interference present in the system and benefit therefore from the diversity and power gains achievable with multiple antenna systems.