Design of adaptive MIMO system using linear

dispersion code
Mabruk Gheryani, Zhiyuan Wu, and Yousef R. Shayan
Concordia University, Department of Electrical Engineering
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
email: (m gherya, zy wu, yshayan)@ece.concordia.ca
AbstractIn this paper, we develop a new design for adap-
tation of linear dispersion code. A new adaptive parameter
called space-time symbol rate is applied in our design. We have
studied the statistics of signal-to-interference-noise of a linear
MMSE receiver over a Rayleigh fading channel. The average
BER for a given constellation using the MMSE receiver is
calculated numerically. With the statistics as a guideline, two
adaptive techniques using constellation and space-time symbol
rate are studied, respectively. If constellation and space-time
symbol rate are considered jointly, more selection modes can
be available. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the average
transmission rate of the joint adaptation can be improved in this
case. Simulation results are provided to show the benets of our
new design.
I. INTRODUCTION
The demand for bandwidth efciency in wireless communi-
cations has experienced an unprecedented growth. One signif-
icant advancement to improve radio spectrum efciency is the
use of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology [1]
[2]. Space-time (ST) codes are the most promising technique
for MIMO systems [3] [4]. Due to battery life and device
size, the power available for radio communications is limited.
Under this power constraint, adaptive technique can cooperate
with MIMO technology to further exploit radio spectrum [5]
[6].
In an adaptive system, a feedback channel is utilized to
provide channel state information (CSI) from the receiver
to the transmitter. According to the feedback of CSI, the
transmitter will adjust transmission parameters, such as power
allocation, modulation, coding rate, etc. This is conditioned
by the fact that the channel stays relatively constant before
the transmitter receives the CSI and then transmits next data
block accordingly. That is, the channel is slow. Many
of adaptive MIMO schemes have been proposed, such as
water-lling-based schemes [1] [7] and various beamforming
schemes [6] [8]. The above schemes often need near-perfect
CSI feedback for adaptation calculation and consume large
feedback bandwidth. In practice, the channel estimation will
exhibit some inaccuracy depending on the estimation method.
The receiver will need time to process the channel estimate
and the feedback is subject to some transmission delay. The
transmitter needs some time to choose a proper code, and
there are possible errors in the feedback channel. All these
factors make the CSI at the transmitter inaccurate. Addition-
ally, the feedback bandwidth is often limited. In these cases,
adaptive schemes with a set of discrete transmission modes
are often more preferable. We can call them selection-mode
adaptation. At the receiver, the channel is measured and then
one transmission mode with the highest transmission rate is
chosen, which meanwhile meets the BER requirement. The
optimal mode is fed back to the transmitter.
For selection-mode MIMO adaptation, the most convenient
adaptive parameter is constellation size for uncoded systems.
For example, constellation adaptation, such as M-QAM, is
applied to space-time block code (STBC) [9] and to space-
time trellis code (STTC) [10]. The disadvantage of these
schemes, is that they are not exible for different rates, which
is the key requirement in the future wireless communications.
Additionally, the gap between the available transmission rates
are often very large due to the use of discrete constellations
[8].
In this paper, we propose to apply linear dispersion code
(LDC) [11] [12] for adaptation. This is because it subsumes
many existing block codes as its special cases which allows
suboptimal linear receivers with greatly reduced complexity,
and provides exible rate-versus-performance tradeoff [11]
[13]. With the application of LDC, a linear MMSE detector
is more attractive due to its simplicity and good performance
[14]. As a guideline, the statistics of SINR for LDCs with a
MMSE receiver is studied and the associated average BER is
calculated numerically. Since the LDC is applied, it makes
ST symbol rate available for adaptation. By adjusting this
new parameter together with constellation size, more available
transmission modes can be provided. Hence, the throughput
under a power constraint can be further improved while the
target bit error rate (BER) is satised.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
In this study, during one ST modulation block, the channel
is assumed to be the same as estimated at the receiver.
Furthermore, the channel is assumed to be a Rayleigh at
fading channel with N
t
transmit and N
r
receive antennas.
Lets denote the complex gain from transmit antenna n to
receiver antenna m by h
mn
and collect them to form an
N
r
N
t
channel matrix H = [h
mn
], known perfectly to the
receiver. The entries in H are assumed to be independently
identically distributed (i.i.d.) symmetrical complex Gaussian
random variables with zero mean and unit variance.
In this system, the information bits are rst mapped into
symbols. After that, the symbol stream is parsed into blocks of
length L. The symbol vector associated with one modulation
block is denoted by x = [x
1
, x
2
, . . . , x
L
]
T
with x
i

{
m
|m = 0, 1, . . . , 2
Q
1, Q 1}, i.e., a complex constella-
tion of size 2
Q
, such as 2
Q
-QAM). The average symbol energy
is assumed to be 1, i.e.,
1
2
Q
2
Q
1

m=0
|
m
|
2
= 1. Each block of
symbols will be mapped by the ST modulator to a dispersion
matrix of size N
t
T and then transmitted over the N
t
transmit
antennas over T channel uses. The following model will be
considered in this study, i.e.,
X =
L

i=1
M
i
x
i
(1)
where M
i
is dened by its L N
t
T dispersion matrices
M
i
= [m
i1
, m
i2
, . . . , m
iT
]. The so-obtained results can be
extended to the model in [11]. With a constellation of size 2
Q
,
the data rate of the space-time modulator in bits per channel
use is
R
m
= Q L/T (2)
Hence, one can adjust ST symbol rate L/T and constellation
size Q according to the feedback from the receiver.
At the receiver, the received signals associated with one
modulation block can be written as
Y =
_
P
N
t
HX+Z =
_
P
N
t
H
L

i=1
M
i
x
i
+Z (3)
where Y is a complex matrix of size Nr T whose (m, n)-
th entry is the received signal at receive antenna m and time
instant n, Z is the additive white Gaussian noise matrix with
i.i.d. symmetrical complex Gaussian elements of zero mean
and variance
2
z
, and P is the average energy per channel
use at each receive antenna. It is often desirable to write the
matrix input-output relationship in (3) in an equivalent vector
notation. Let vec() be the operator that forms a column vector
by stacking the columns of a matrix and dene y = vec(Y),
z = vec(Z), and m
i
= vec(M
i
), then (3) can be rewritten as
y =
_
P
N
t
HGx +z =
_
P
N
t

Hx +z (4)
where H = I
T
H with as the Kronecker product
operator and G = [m
1
, m
2
, . . . , m
L
] will be referred to as
the modulation matrix.
III. THE STATISTICS OF SINR WITH THE MMSE
RECEIVER
Since the LDC is linear, an MMSE detector can be ap-
plied as suboptimal receiver due to its simplicity and good
performance [14]. The main goal of this section is to study
the error-rate probability and the statistics of SINR for LDCs
[11]- [13] using linear MMSE receiver over a Rayleigh fading
channel.
We consider a general system model as shown in Section II.
In our study, N
r
N
t
is assumed. For simplicity, we choose
T equal to N
t
and L equal to N
t
T.
Equation (4) can also be written as
y =
_
P
N
t

h
i
x
i
+
_
P
N
t

j=i

h
j
x
j
+z (5)
In the sequel, the i-th column of

H, denoted as

h
i
, will be
referred to as the signature signal of symbol x
i
.
Without loss of generality, we consider the estimation of one
symbol, say x
i
. Collect the rest of the symbols into a column
vector x
I
and denote

H
I
= [

h
1
, ..,

h
i1
,

h
i+1
, ...,

h
L
] as the
matrix obtained by removing the i-th column from

H.
A linear MMSE receiver is applied and the corresponding
output is given by
x
i
= w
H
i
y = x
i
+ z
i
. (6)
where z
i
is the noise term of zero mean. The corresponding
w
i
can be found as
w
i
=
_

h
i

h
H
i
+R
I
_
1

h
i
_
P
N
t

h
H
i
_

h
i

h
H
i
+R
I
_
1

h
i
(7)
where R
I
=

H
I

H
H
I
+
Nt
2
z
P
I. Note that the scaling factor
1
_
P
N
t

h
H
i
(

h
i

h
H
i
+R
I)
1

h
i
in the coefcient vector of the MMSE
receiver w
i
is added to ensure an unbiased detection as
indicated by (6). The variance of the noise term z
i
can be
found from (6) and (7) as

2
i
= w
H
i
R
I
w
i
(8)
With (7) and (8), the SINR of MMSE associated with x
i
is

i
=
1

2
i
=
_
P
N
t
_

h
H
i
R
1
I

h
i
(9)
The average BER over MIMO fading channel for a given
constellation can be found as follows.
BER
av
= E

i
_
1
L

i
BER(
i
(

H, ))
_
(10)
where =
P
N
t

2
z
.
In our LDC design, all the symbols has the same SINR, i.e.,

1
=
2
= =
L
= . Equation (10) can be written as
BER
av
=
_
BER(, )P

()d (11)
By using singular value decomposition (SVD), (9) can be
written as
=
_
P
N
t
_

h
H
i
U
1
U
H

h
i
(12)
where U
H
is an N
2
t
1 N
2
t
1 unitary matrix and the
matrix is (N
2
t
1) (N
2
t
1) with nonnegative numbers
on the diagonal and zeros off the diagonal. Lets dene
h

= U
H

h
i
0 5 10 15 20
10
6
10
5
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR
B
E
R
3x3


8PSKSimulation
8PSKNumerical
Fig. 1. Numerical and simulation results for LDC with MMSE receiver
which is the transformed propagation vector with components
h

l
, l = 1, ...........N
r
N
t
.
The vector h

has the same statistics as the original vector

h
i
[1]. We can replace |h

l
|
2
by |

h
il
|
2
. Now, we can write (12)
as
=
r

i=1

|

h
il
|
2
(
l
+ 1)
+
N
t
N
r

r+1
|

h
il
|
2
(13)
where r is the rank of

H
I

H
H
I
. The closed-form formula for
the average BER in (11) is difcult to nd. For example, the
BER
av
for 2

-PSK can be written as

BER
av
=
2

_
Q
_
_
2 sin(

2

)
_
P

() d (14)
and for rectangular 2

-QAM can be written as

BER
av
=
4

_
Q
_
_
3
2

1
_
P

() d (15)
where Q() denotes the Gaussian-Q function. Here, the above
average BER is calculated numerically. In Fig. 1, numerical
and simulation results are compared for 8PSK over 3 3 and
4PSK over 44 fading channels, respectively. As can be seen,
the numerical and simulation results match very well.
IV. DESIGN OF SELECTION-MODE ADAPTATION
The general idea of selection-mode adaptation is to maxi-
mize the average transmission rate by choosing a proper trans-
mission mode from a set of available modes. Based on some
certain strategy, the transmitter is informed by the receiver to
increase or decrease the transmission rate depending on the
channel condition, i.e., CSI. For selection-mode adaptation,
the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) will be considered as a proper
metric. The corresponding adaptive algorithm is proposed as
follows.
1) Find the SNR, saying
o
, at the receiver;
2) Find the BERs of each mode at the obtained SNR
o
from BER curves by experiment;
3) Select a proper transmission mode with the maximum
rate while satisfying the target BER;
4) Feed back the selected mode to the transmitter.
We can formulate the selection of transmission modes as
follows.

opt
= arg max
{n,n=1,2,...,N}
R

n
(16)
subject to
BER

n
(
o
) BER
target
(17)
where {
n
, n = 1, 2, . . . , N} is the set of transmission
modes, R
n
is the rate of transmission mode
n
, BER
n
(
o
)
is the BER of transmission mode
n
at SNR
o
and
BER
target
is the target BER. Without loss of generality, we
assume R

1
< R

2
< . . . < R

N
.
opt
is the optimal
transmission mode at SNR
o
.
Below, we consider the average transmission rate using the
proposed adaptive algorithm. Let

n
denote the minimum
SNR satisfying the following condition.

n
= arg min

[BER

n
() BER
target
)] (18)
That is, for the SNR region

n+1
, the trans-
mission rate R
n
(i.e., the transmission mode
n
) should be
selected while the target BER is satised.
Then, the average transmission rate is

R =
N

n=1
R

n
_

n+1

n
p

()d (19)
where p

() is the probability density function (PDF) of

the SNR and

N+1
= . Maximization of the average
transmission rate

R can be solved using Lagrange multi-
pliers. However, due to the structure of both the objective
function and the inequality constraint, an analytical solution
is extremely difcult to nd. Therefore, we will nd the
SNR region corresponding to each transmission mode by
measurement.
In our simulations, we assume N
t
= N
r
= 4 and use the
following dispersion matrices for our design
M
(k1)N
t
+i
= diag[f
k
]P
(i1)
(20)
for k = 1, 2, . . . , N
t
and i = 1, 2, . . . , N
t
, Pis the permutation
matrix of size N
t
and given by
P =
_
0
1(N
t
1)
1
I
Nt1
0
(N
t
1)1
_
(21)
where f
k
denotes the k-th column vector of F. F = [f
mn
] is
a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) matrix and f
mn
is calculated
by
f
mn
=
1

N
t
exp(2j(m1)(n 1)/N
t
) (22)
First, we perform constellation adaptation alone with a xed
ST symbol rate. Secondly, we perform the ST symbol rate
adaptation alone with a xed constellation. Finally, we will
consider these two parameter jointly to maximize the average
transmission rate meanwhile maintaining the target BER,
which is equal to 10
3
in our design examples.
4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


8PSK
QPSK
BPSK
16QAM
(a) L/T = 1
2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


BPSK
QPSK
8PSK
16QAM
(b) L/T = 2
5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


BPSK
QPSK
8PSK
16QAM
(c) L/T = 3
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


BPSK
QPSK
8PSK
16QAM
(d) L/T = 4
Fig. 2. Adaptive Constellation.
A. Adaptation Using Variable Constellations
Although the system design for continuous-rate scenario
provide intuitive and useful guidelines [8], the associated
constellation mapper requires high implementation complex-
ity. In practice, discrete constellations are preferable. That is,
Q only takes integer number, such as Q = 1, 2, 3, ..... For
a given adaptive system, we can adjust the constellation to
maximize the transmission rate meanwhile keeping the target
BER satised. The proposed adaptive algorithm is applied to
the case. Here, we only consider BPSK (Q = 1), QPSK (Q =
2), 8PSK (Q = 3) and 16QAM (Q = 4) as examples. That
is,
n
{BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK, 16QAM} with a xed ST
symbol rate. The optimal transmission mode is selected by the
proposed adaptive algorithm, i.e., by equation (16) and (17).
Simulation results are shown in Fig. 2, where each subgure
has its own ST symbol rate.
B. Adaptation Using Variable ST Symbol Rate
In other existing schemes, only the orthogonal designs,
such as Alamouti scheme, are applied as the ST modulation.
In this case, the most convenient adaptive parameter is the
constellation size. For our adaptive scheme, the application
of LDC makes another adaptive parameter available, i.e., ST
symbol rate. In this subsection, we x the constellation size
but adjust the ST symbol rate for adaptation. Additionally,
one advantage of using ST symbol rate is that it is easier to
change ST symbol rate than constellation size for adaptation.
2 0 2 4 6 8 10
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


3 Layer
4 layer
1 layer
2 layer
(a) BPSK (Q = 1)
2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
10
6
10
5
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


2 layer
3 layer
4 layer
1 layer
(b) QPSK (Q = 2)
0 5 10 15 20 25
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


1 layer
2 layer
3 layer
4 layer
(c) 8PSK (Q = 3)
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
10
4
10
3
10
2
10
1
10
0
SNR(dB)
B
E
R


3 layer
1 layer
2 layer
4 layer
(d) 16QAM (Q = 4)
Fig. 3. Adaptive ST symbol rate.
The proposed adaptive algorithm described by (16) and (17)
can be applied to ST symbol rate adaptation.
Note that, this system with 4 transmit antennas can have
16 choices of ST symbol rates, i.e., (
1
4

16
4
). For
convenience and less complexity, we use 4 choices, i.e.,
L
T
=
1, 2, 3, 4. That is,
n
{
L
T
= 1,
L
T
= 2,
L
T
= 3,
L
T
= 4} with
a xed constellation. In the following context, the integer of
L
T
is referred as layer. The simulation results are shown in
Fig. 3, where each subgure has its own constellation.
V. JOINT ADAPTIVE TECHNIQUE
As shown in the previous two subsections, either constella-
tion adaptation or ST symbol rate adaptation can increase the
average transmission rate while the given BER is satised as
compared to non-adaptive schemes. However, we can further
improve the average transmission rate by applying a joint
adaptation. The joint adaptation is performed by choosing
the best pair of constellation size and ST symbol rate. The
available transmission modes are increased. That is,

n
{(BPSK,
L
T
= 1), . . . , (BPSK,
L
T
= 4),
(QPSK,
L
T
= 1), . . . , (QPSK,
L
T
= 4),
(8PSK,
L
T
= 1), . . . , (8PSK,
L
T
= 4),
(16QAM,
L
T
= 1), . . . , (16QAM,
L
T
= 4)}
We can reduce the gap between the selection modes further
by adding more choices of the transmission rates. For the
target BER, a scheme with the joint adaptation can improve
the average transmission rate signicantly as compared to the
two techniques in the previous subsections.
TABLE I
JOINT ADAPTATION OF ST SYMBOL RATE AND CONSTELLATION SIZE
MODE Constellation L/T Rm
L
T
Q
0 - - - < 0.6309
1 BPSK 1 1 0.6309
1
1
< 0.1893
2 QPSK 1 2 0.1893
2
1
< 1.4058
3 QPSK 2 4 1.4058
2
2
< 4.4833
4 QPSK 3 6 4.4833
2
3
< 8.9696
5 8PSK 3 9 8.9696
3
3
< 24.2533
6 8PSK 4 12 24.2533
3
4
< 30.8208
7 16QAM 4 16
4
4
30.8208
We conclude the result in Table I. In the following context,

L
T
Q
denotes the SNR associated with the transmission mode
with 2
Q
constellation and
L
T
ST symbol rate.
From the simulation results, we have the following obser-
vations:
If the ST symbol rate is reduced, the slope of the
associated BER curve becomes steeper, which suggests
a larger diversity;
If the constellation size is reduced, the BER curve will
shift to left with the similar slope, which suggests the
diversity keeps the same but the coding gain is improved.
There exists a tradeoff between diversity gain and multiplexing
gain [15]. However, this tradeoff can not provide insight for
the adaptive system with discrete constellations. From the
above observations, we nd that we can improve data rate
by using the two adaptive parameters jointly. Specically, in
some cases, we can adjust constellation size to improve rate
and performance; which in the other cases, we will adjust ST
symbol rate, i.e., multiplexing gain, for adaptation. To proceed,
we have the following proposition.
Proposition 1: The average transmission rate in the adap-
tive selection-mode system can be improved by adding more
possible transmission modes providing higher data rate than
the corresponding original mode at the same SNR region.
Proof: Let us dene the SNR regions of our adaptive system
using one set of selection modes as follows.

i

i
< <
i+1
associated with R
i
If we add more possible selection modes, the SNR regions
will be changed as follows.

i

i
< <

i
associated with R
i

i
< <
i+1
associated with R

i
We assume R

i
> R
i
for any i. The total average rate for
original scheme can be written as

R =

i
R
i
_
i+1

i
p

()d
The total average rate when for the scheme with more
transmission modes can be written as

A =

i
(R
i
_

i
p

()d +R

i
_

i+1

i
p

()d)
It is obvious that

A >

R
VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we proposed a new adaptive design with LDC.
We studied the statistics of SINR of LDC with MMSE receiver
as a guideline. Since the LDC is applied, it makes space-
time symbol rate available for adaptation. Two adaptation
techniques using constellation and space-time symbol rate are
studied, respectively. With joint adaptation of space-time sym-
bol rate and constellation size, more transmission modes can
be provided to reduce rate gap among transmission modes and
thus improve the average throughput. Additionally, with space-
time symbol rate of the linear dispersion code, the adaptive
design can be simplied and various levels of diversity and
multiplexing gain can be provided. Simulation results were
provided to demonstrate merits of the joint adaptation of
constellation and space-time symbol rate.
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