Adaptive MIMO-OFDM with low signalling overhead for unbalanced antenna systems

The knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter (TX), which in case of time division duplex (TDD) systems can be easily obtained due to radio channel reciprocity, can dramatically increase the spectral efficiency of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. This paper presents a robust link adaptation method for TDD systems employing MIMO-OFDM channel eigenmode based signalling. We propose a rather simple logarithm-free, bit and power loading algorithm which requires low signalling overhead. Proposed method maintains constant frame error rate (FER) by controlling the instantaneous transmitted power in such a way that the average SNR at the equalizer output is kept constant. The scheme takes into account channel estimation errors at TX side by partial compensation of the SNR estimation errors. By using a simple scalar channel encoder, for an unbalanced MIMO system with larger number of transmit than receive antennas, the achieved spectral efficiency at low and medium SNR is significantly higher than the outage MIMO capacity with unknown CSI at the TX. The simulation results show that for a constant FER, the throughput degradation compared to the universally accepted Hughes-Hartogs algorithm is negligible.