20

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004

A Transmit Preprocessing Technique for Multiuser MIMO Systems Using

a Decomposition Approach
Lai-U Choi and Ross D. Murch, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractWe introduce a transmit preprocessing technique

for the downlink of multiuser multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) systems. It decomposes the multiuser MIMO downlink
channel into multiple parallel independent single-user MIMO
downlink channels. Some key properties are that each equivalent
single-user MIMO channel has the same properties as a conventional single-user MIMO channel, and that increasing the number
of transmit antennas of the multiuser system by one increases the
number of spatial channels to each user by one. Simulation results
are also provided and these results demonstrate the potential of
our technique in terms of performance and capacity.
Index TermsMultiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)
systems, multiuser decomposition, multiuser multiple-input
multiple-output (MU-MIMO), transmit single processing.
Fig. 1.

System configuration of a multiuser MIMO system.

I. INTRODUCTION

N RECENT years, wireless multiple-input multiple-output

(MIMO) systems with multiple antennas employed at both
the transmitter and receiver have gained attention because of
their promising improvement in terms of performance and bandwidth efficiency [1]. In the downlink, several single-user techniques have been proposed [2][5] such as vertical Bell Laboratories layered spacetime (V-BLAST), maximum likelihood detection (MLD), and singular value decomposition (SVD)-based
techniques.
Here we introduce a multiuser MIMO transmit preprocessing
technique for the downlink of multiuser MIMO systems. The
technique is based on decomposing a multiuser MIMO downlink channel into parallel independent single-user MIMO downlink channels. Once the multiuser channels are decomposed, any
single-user MIMO technique (such as MLD and BLAST) can be
applied in the usual way to each user.
Previously, there has been only limited work on multiuser
MIMO systems for the downlink. Examples include[6] and [7],
where multiuser MIMO systems are considered and processing
at both of the receivers and transmitter is assumed to be linear.
The work in [6] attempts to find the antenna weights for the
transmitter and receivers jointly by maximizing the spectral
efficiency for a multiuser MIMO time-division multiple-access
(TDMA) system and [7] finds the antenna weights jointly
by maximizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for
a multiuser MIMO code-division multiple-access system.
However, the solution for the antenna weights in [6] is not

guaranteed to exist since the proposed iterative algorithm is

not guaranteed to converge. On the other hand, the solution for
the antenna weights in [7] is suboptimal. Another issue is that
particular linear receiver structures are assumed in both of the
systems and these impose certain restrictions on the systems.
Our work is different in that we introduce a transmit preprocessing technique at the base station (BS) for the downlink
of multiuser MIMO systems that decomposes a multiuser
MIMO downlink channel into multiple parallel independent
single-user MIMO downlink channels. Therefore, any technique for single-user MIMO systems, such as V-BLAST,
MLD, and joint transmit and receive MIMO processing (e.g.,
SVD-based techniques), can be applied for each user of the
multiuser MIMO systems. Some key properties of this decomposition include that each equivalent single-user MIMO
channel has the same properties as a conventional single-user
MIMO channel, and that increasing the number of transmit
antennas of the multiuser system by one increases the number
of spatial channels to each user by one. Simulation results are
also provided and these results demonstrate the potential of our
technique in terms of performance and capacity.
The structure of our contribution is as follows. In Section II,
the system model of a multiuser MIMO system is introduced,
while the problem formulation and the solution are provided
in Section III. Then, Section IV gives some discussions of the
key properties and some simulation results are provided in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes our work.

Manuscript received March 13, 2002; revised November 26, 2002; accepted
November 27, 2002. The editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication is L. Hanzo. This work was supported by the Hong
Kong Research Grant Council (HKUST6024/01E).
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
The Hong Kong University of Science Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon,
Hong Kong (e-mail: eeluchoi@ee.ust.hk; eermurch@ee.ust.hk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2003.821148

II. SYSTEM MODEL

The configuration of our proposed multiuser MIMO system
is shown in Fig. 1, where
antennas are located at the BS and
antennas are located at the th mobile station (MS). In total,
MSs or users in the system. At the BS, the data
there are
are processed before transmission, which we refer to as transmit

1536-1276/04$20.00 2004 IEEE

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004

preprocessing, and then launched into the MIMO channel. Let

represent the
transmit data symbol vector for user
, where
is the number of parallel data symbols transmitted
. This data symbol
simultaneously for user
vector is passed through a transmit precoder, which is charac,a
matrix that
terized by the precoding matrix
nonzero values and outputs
terms. Each of the
takes in
output terms is transmitted by each of the
transmit antennas.
We assume that the channel is flat fading and denote the
, which is a
matrix.
MIMO channel to user as
Its ( )th element is the complex gain from the th transmit
antenna at the BS to the th receive antenna at MS . Also, its
elements are independently identically distributed (i.i.d.) zero
mean complex Gaussian random variables with unity variance.
receive antennas are used to receive
At the receiver of user ,
the
data symbols and the received signals can be written by
, which is given by
a vector of length

(1)
is an
vector, whose elements are
where the noise
i.i.d. zero mean complex Gaussian random variables with variance .
Throughout this letter, we denote a -user system with
transmit antennas at the BS and
antennas at the th MS
) system, and we will refer to a
as a (
transmit antennas at the BS and
single-user system with
antennas at the MS as a (
) system.
III. PROBLEM FORMULATION

21

Therefore, it can be shown that the solution to (2) is equivalent

to the solution of
..
.
..
.
for

(3)

Letting
be the th column of
, since
implies that
is in the null space or kernel of
simplify (3) further as the solution of

(4)
where
,
denotes the null space or kernel
represents the intersection of the subspaces.
of , and
Note that the precoding matrix
should be a nonzero matrix, otherwise, no signal is transmitted. To guarantee the existence of a nonzero precoding matrix, a sufficient condition is
that the number of the transmit antennas is larger than the sum
users and is
of the number of receive antennas of any
written as
(5)

Under this sufficient condition, let

orthonormal basis of the subspace

By using the system model introduced in Section II, our priprecoding matrices,
mary objective is to select the nonzero
, for the users such that at the receiver
users.
of each MS there is no interference from the other
This can be expressed as

, we can

be an
, where

is the dimension of this subspace. By letting

(6)
from (4), we can write a solution to (3) as
(7)

(2)
..
.

where
is a nonzero
matrix, which can be designed alone by some criteria or can be jointly designed with
the structure of the receiver. More explicit details about the decan be found later in this section. Also, note
sign of matrix
, because
is orthonormal and
that
. The matrix
can be computed by
SVD
..
.

where
represents the trace operation and the constraint
states that the transmit power of user is limited . It should be
noted that
represents the interference
users, and therefore, our primary
to user due to other
objective function in (2) nulls all interference for each user.
Since
are arbitrary data vectors,
implies
for
.

(8)
..
.
From (8), we can see that the dimension of
is
,
. Under the sufficient
where

22

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004

Fig. 2. MU-MIMO decomposition: Decomposing a multiuser MIMO channel

into parallel single-user MIMO channels.

condition given in (5) and the assumption of i.i.d. channel, we

is
can obtain that the dimension of the subspace
(9)
with probability one. By substituting (7) into (1), we can obtain

(10)
Note that the multiuser MIMO system denoted by (1) has been
parallel single-user MIMO systems. A close
decoupled to
observation of (10) shows that we can think of the equivalent
and the equivsingle-user MIMO channel of user as
. As shown
alent transmit processing can be represented as
in Fig. 2, the multiuser MIMO channel is decomposed to parallel single-user MIMO channels. We refer to the decomposing
process in (10) as multiuser MIMO decomposition and we refer
to a multiuser MIMO system applying this decomposition as
MU-MIMO system.
is the equivalent transmit processing for the equivSince
, the design
alent single-user MIMO channel of user ,
of
is the same as designing the transmit processing for a
is a scaling idensingle-user MIMO system. For example,
tity matrix if the V-BLAST technique is employed for the user,
is consists of the right singular vectors of
while
if the SVD technique is used.
Finally, we would like to point out that the number of simultaneous users in the proposed system is restricted by the number
of transmit antennas. If the number of users is large, other access techniques, such as TDMA, need to be used together with
the proposed technique so that all the users can obtain service.
IV. KEY PROPERTIES
The key properties of the multiuser MIMO decomposition
discussed in Section III are as follows.
1) A multiuser MIMO downlink channel is decomposed into
parallel independent single-user MIMO channels (see
Fig. 2). Therefore, any technique suitable for the downlink of single-user MIMO systems, such as V-BLAST,
MLD, and joint transmit and receive MIMO processing

(e.g., SVD-based techniques), can be applied for each

user of the multiuser MIMO systems.
2) Each equivalent single-user MIMO channel has the same
properties as a conventional single-user MIMO channel.
As shown in Fig. 2, the equivalent channel of user can
, whose dimension is
.
be given by
are i.i.d. zero mean complex
Since the elements of
Gaussian random variables with unity variance and
is orthonormal, the elements of
are also i.i.d.
zero mean complex Gaussian random variables with unity
variance. Hence, the equivalent system for user after
the multiuser MIMO decomposition is a system with
transmit antennas and
receive antennas.
3) Increasing the number of transmit antennas of the multiuser system by one increases the dimension of the equivalent MIMO channel of each user by one. That is, inby one increases the value of
creasing the value of
by one for all users
. This can be observed from the relationship discussed in Section III that
with probability one.
4) The system capacity of this multiuser MIMO system increases linearly with the number of transmit antennas. For
transmit
example, a -user MU-MIMO system with
antennas at the BS and two receive antennas at each MS
is equivalent to parallel (2,2) systems. Therefore, when
the number of transmit antennas increases, the number of
users can increase without affecting the individual systems.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
In this section, the MU-MIMO system introduced in the
previous sections is investigated by computer simulation. In the
simulation, quadrature-phase-shift keying (QPSK) is utilized.
The flat fading MIMO channel, whose elements are i.i.d. zero
mean complex Gaussian random variables with variance one,
is fixed for 100 symbols and more than 10 000 independent
channels are used to obtain each bit-error-rate simulation.
Throughout this section, we consider a -user system with
transmit antennas at the BS and
receive antennas at each
), and we will refer to it
MS (
) system. In order to satisfy the
as a (
sufficient condition for the existence of a nonzero precoding
. Also, we assume
matrix solution, we assume
for each user
that the number of data streams is equal to
). We denote a single-user system
(
transmit antennas at the BS and receive antennas at
with
each MS as a (
) system.
In Fig. 3, we provide sample performance comparison between our MU-MIMO systems and single-user MIMO systems.
) are employed at each MS. Three
Two receive antennas (
different cases are compared:
with SVD-based technique
(i.e., the data stream is transmitted through the channel with
with minimum mean square
the largest singular value),
with maximum
error (MMSE) receiver at each user, and
likelihood (ML) receiver at each user. It can be observed
that the performance of our three-user MU-MIMO system,
(6,[2,2,2]) configuration, is similar to that of the single-user

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004

Fig. 3. Performance comparison between single-user MIMO systems and

MU-MIMO systems.

Fig. 4. Performance comparison between single-user MISO systems and

MU-MISO systems.

system, (2,2) configuration, for all cases. This is consistent

with the result in Section IV, in which we show that (6,[2,2,2])
MU-MIMO system is equivalent to a ( , 2) configuration
from (9). We also deduced in
single-user system and
transmit
Section IV that a -user MU-MIMO system with
antennas at the BS and two receive antennas at each MS is
equivalent to parallel (2,2) systems. These results reveal that
the capacity of the MU-MIMO system increases as the number
of the transmit antennas increases.
Since the multi-input single-output (MISO) system is a
special case of an MIMO system, our approach is applicable to
multiuser MISO systems (we refer to it as MU-MISO system).
In Fig. 4, we provide performance comparison results for
MU-MISO systems and single-user MISO systems. We can
see that the performance of (3,[1,1,1]) configuration is similar
to that of (1,1) configuration, the performance of (4,[1,1,1])
configuration is similar to that of (2,1) configuration, and

23

Fig. 5. Overall capacity of our MU-MIMO system versus the number of users
for various values of total transmit power P , when the number of transmit
antennas is equal to 15 and the number of receive antennas at each user is two.

the performance of (5,[1,1,1]) configuration is similar to that

of (3,1) configuration. These results are consistent with the
analysis in Section IV that increasing the number of transmit
antennas of the multiuser system by one increases the number
of transmit antennas of each single-user by one.
A close observation to Figs. 3 and 4 reveals the flexibility of
our method. Multiple data streams can be transmitted simultaneously for each user. In Fig. 3, the (6,[2,2,2]) MU-MIMO
outperforms that when
. The
system when
(7,[2,2,2]) MU-MIMO system outperforms the (6,[2,2,2])
. Moreover, the ML receiver
MU-MIMO system when
provides better performance than the MMSE receiver when
. In Fig. 4, we can see that the (4,[1,1,1]) MU-MISO
system when
provides better performance than that
, and the (4,[1,1,1]) MU-MISO system outperforms
when
. Therefore,
the (3,[1,1,1]) MU-MISO system when
we can trade off between the data rate and the performance.
Moreover, we can increase the transmit antennas to improve
the performance and also the structure of the receiver can assist
improving the performance.
In Fig. 5, we provide the overall capacity of our MU-MIMO
system versus the number of users for various values of the
total transmit power when the number of transmit antennas
is equal to 15 and the number of receive antennas at each user
is two. In the simulation, we assume the noise variance
and the total transmit power ranges from 0 to 20 dB. Equal
power is located for each user. The overall capacity is given
), where
is the
by taking the expectation of , (i.e.,
sum of the capacity of all the equivalent parallel single-user
MIMO channels, each of which is computed by the standard
formula with water filling solution given in [8]. Here, it can be
observed that the capacity may increase when the number of
users increases. For example, when the number of users ( )
equals six and the total transmit power ( ) equals 20 dB, the
capacity is about 60 b/channel-use, which is triple the capacity
when there is one user and is twice the capacity when there are
two users. This is because after the multiuser decomposition,

24

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY 2004

users, a (15,[2,2,2,2]) channel, can achieve two times as much

as the capacity of a single-user (15,2) channel when the total
transmit power is 10 dB (see Fig. 5). Similarly, the capacity
of our MU-MIMO system with five users, a (15,[2,2,2,2,2])
channel, can achieve three times as much as the capacity of
a single-user (15,2) channel when the total transmit power is
20 dB. This demonstrates the potential of multiuser operation
and our MU-MIMO system, which can provide increased
capacity when the number of receive antennas at each MS is
limited.
VI. CONCLUSION

Fig. 6. Capacity of a single-user MIMO system versus the number of transmit

antennas for various number of receive antennas when total transmit power
equals to 10 dB.

the (15,[2,2,2,2,2,2]) channel is equivalent to six parallel (5,2)

channels and the (15,[2,2]) channel is equivalent to two parallel
(13,2) channels. The capacity of the six parallel (5,2) channels
is larger than both the capacity of the two parallel (13,2) channels and the (15,2) channel. However, note that the capacity decreases when the number of users ( ) equals seven compared
to that when the number of users ( ) equals six. This is because our MU-MIMO system loses transmit diversity in order
to eliminate the multiple-user interference. The more users, the
more transmit diversity it loses for the more multiple-user interference. Therefore, the optimum capacity occurs at a certain
number of users, where it has good tradeoff between the gain of
multiple-user diversity and the loss of transmit diversity.
Finally, Fig. 6 presents the capacity of a single-user MIMO
system versus the number of transmit (Tx) antennas for various
number of receive (Rx) antennas when total transmit power
equals 10 dB. Similar to Fig. 5, the capacity is given by taking
) over the MIMO channel [8].
the expectation of (i.e.,
We can observe that the capacity increases as the number of
transmit antennas increases. However, when the number of
receive antennas is fixed, say two receive antennas, even though
there are ten or even more transmit antennas, the capacity is
small. This is because the small number of receive antennas
limits the capacity. By allowing multiusers, each still with a
small number of receive antennas, and using our MU-MIMO
decomposition, the overall capacity increases while each user
still receives comparable capacity to the single-user case. For
example, the capacity of our MU-MIMO system with four

We have introduced a transmit preprocessing technique for

the downlink of multiuser MIMO systems. It decomposes the
multiuser MIMO downlink channel into parallel independent
single-user MIMO downlink channels. Used together with this
decomposition technique, all the previous proposed MIMO
processing techniques, which are suitable for the downlink of
single-user MIMO systems, are applicable in the downlink of
multiuser MIMO systems. Some key properties are provided.
It is shown that the capacity of this multiuser MIMO system
increases linearly with the number of transmit antennas and
this system can provide increased capacity when the number of
receive antennas at the mobile stations are limited. Simulation
results are also provided and these results reveal the potential
of our technique in terms of performance and capacity.
REFERENCES
[1] G. J. Foschini and M. J. Gans, On limits of wireless communications in
a fading environment when using multiple antennas, Wireless Personal
Commun., vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 311335, Mar. 1998.
[2] G. D. Golden, G. J. Foschini, R. A. Valenzuela, and P. W. Wolniansky,
Detection algorithm and initial laboratory results using V-BLAST
space-time communication architecture, Electron. Lett., vol. 35, no. 1,
pp. 1416, Jan. 1999.
[3] V. Tarokh, N. Seshadri, and A. R. Calderbank, Space-time codes for
high data rate wireless communication: Performance criterion and code
construction, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol. 44, pp. 744765, Mar.
1998.
[4] H. Sampath and A. J. Paulraj, Joint transmit and receive optimization
for high data rate wireless communications using multiple antennas,
in Proc. 33rd Asilomar Conf. Signals, Systems, and Computers, vol. 1,
Mar. 1999, pp. 215219.
[5] K. K. Wong, R. D. Murch, and K. B. Letaief, Optimizing time and space
MIMO antenna system for frequency selective fading channels, IEEE
J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 19, pp. 13951407, July 2001.
[6] K. K. Wong, R. D. Murch, R. S. Cheng, and K. B. Letaief, Optimizing
the spectral efficiency of multiuser MIMO smart antenna systems, in
Proc. IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conf. (WCNC)
2000, vol. 1, pp. 426430.
[7] R. L. Choi, K. B. Letaief, and R. D. Murch, MIMO CDMA antenna
systems, Proc. IEEE Int. Communications Conf. (ICC) 2000 , vol. 2,
pp. 990994.
[8] I. E. Telatar, Capacity of multi-antenna Gaussian channels, Eur. Trans.
Telecommun., vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 585595, Nov./Dec. 1999.