On the Precoder Design of Flat Fading MIMO Systems Equipped With MMSE Receivers: A Large-System Approach

International audienceThis paper is devoted to the design of precoders maximizing the ergodic mutual information (EMI) of bi-correlated flat fading MIMO systems equipped with MMSE receivers. The channel state information and the second-order statistics of the channel are assumed available at the receiver side and at the transmitter side respectively. As the direct maximization of the EMI needs the use of nonattractive algorithms, it is proposed to optimize an approximation of the EMI, introduced recently, obtained when the number of transmit and receive antennas and r converge to infinity at the same rate. It is established that the relative error between the actual EMI and its approximation is a O(1/t(2)) term. It is shown that the left singular eigenvectors of the optimum precoder coincide with the eigenvectors of the transmit covariance matrix, and its singular values are solution of a certain maximization problem. Numerical experiments show that the mutual information provided by this precoder is close from what is obtained by maximizing the true EMI, but that the algorithm maximizing the approximation is much less computationally intensive