Minimum probability-of-error perturbation precoding for the one-bit massive MIMO downlink

International audienceLinear precoders have been shown to perform reasonably well at low SNR when the basestation of a MIMO downlink employs one-bit digital-to-analog converters to quantize the pre-coder outputs. However, at medium-to-high SNRs, an error floor is encountered due to the coarse quantization. This paper examines methods for slightly perturbing the transmitted signal prior to quantization in an effort to improve downlink performance at higher SNRs. The perturbation is performed with the goal of minimizing the worst-case probability of error among the user terminals, and assumes that the symbols to be transmitted are drawn from a finite alphabet constellation. Two different types of perturbations are studied, and it is found via simulation that the methods can provide dramatic gains in downlink performance. Index Terms— one-bit quantization, massive MIMO, linear precoding, perturbation precoding, minimum probability of error precodin