Interference Mitigation for MIMO Systems Employing User-specific, Linear Precoding

User-specific, linear precoding is used extensively by almost all existing and emerging wireless MIMO standards [1], [2], [3], [4]. With user-specific, linear precoding, the data symbols to be transmitted to each user are passed through a linear transformation before being sent to the transmit antennas, and a different precoder is used for each user depending on his/her channel. For example, with 4 transmit antennas at the BS, 2 receive antennas at the mobile, and instant channel quality indicator (CQI), the cell capacity of a 4x2 2-clustered system with user-specific, linear precoding is more than 80% higher than the cell capacity of a system with one transmit antenna [10]. But such schemes are vulnerable to delayed CQI due to fast variations of interference, leading in some cases to performance that is worse than a SISO system. In this paper, we will present a method that mitigates the degradation due to fast-varying interference in MIMO systems that use linear precoding. We will show that the temporal variation of other-cell interference is almost eliminated with this method. Our results indicate that for a 4x2 2-Clustered transmit array with the proposed method, the performance loss due to delayed CQI is reduced from 35% to 5%.