Interference in Multiple-antenna Communications: From Channel Estimation to Exploitation

Multi-antenna technologies have emerged as attractive techniques of providing efficient and reliable communications in future wireless communications. The potential gain of multiple antennas in the downlink of wireless systems is well-known: if the spatial dimension is exploited to deliver simultaneous data streams to multiple users, the total data throughput increases linearly with the number of transmit antennas. However, interference in multiple-antenna communications presents a challenging factor that should be dealt with wisely in cellular systems. This thesis is concerned with tackling the interference at two different steps in the communications process: channel estimation, and downlink data transmissions. The interference at estimation process can occur in reciprocity based channel state information (CSI) acquisition if the utilized pilots are reused in the network. On the other hand, the interference at downlink occurs when the base station serves multiple users simultaneously over the same spectrum.
This first part of the thesis focuses on the channel estimation in multiple antenna multicell interference-limited networks. The channel state information (CSI) acquisition is vital for interference mitigation. Wireless networks often suffer from multicell interference, which can be mitigated by deploying beamforming to spatially direct the transmissions. The accuracy of the estimated CSI plays an important role in de-signing accurate precoders that can control the amount of interference created from simultaneous spatial transmissions to mobile users. Therefore, a new technique based on the structure of the spatial covariance matrix and the discrete cosine transform
(DCT) is proposed to enhance channel estimation in the presence of interference. Bayesian estimation and Least Squares estimation frameworks are introduced by utilizing the DCT to separate the overlapping spatial paths that create the interference. The spatial domain is thus exploited to mitigate the contamination and enhance the quality of estimation.
The second part of the thesis focuses on the precoding techniques in the downlink of a single cell. The constructive interference concept in the downlink of multiple-antenna systems is addressed in this paper. The concept of the joint exploitation of CSI and data information (DI) is discussed. Using symbol-level precoding, the interference between data streams is transformed under certain conditions into useful signal that can improve the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the downlink transmissions. In this thesis, not only different constructive interference precoding techniques are proposed for different types of modulation, but also a transmitter architecture that can accommodate them. These schemes optimize the performance of the symbol-level precoding with respect to different objectives such as: minimizing the transmit power under per user quality of service constraint, maximizing the fairness among different users under total power constraint. Extensive simulations are performed to validate our proposed techniques and show that they outperform the conventional precoding schemes.