Optimal MIMO Precoding Under a Constraint on the Amplifier Power Consumption

The capacity of the MIMO channel taking into account both a limitation on total consumed power, and per-antenna radiated power constraints is considered. The total consumed power takes into account the traditionally used sum radiated power, and also the power dissipation in the amplifiers. For a fixed channel with full CSI at both the transmitter and the receiver, maximization of the mutual information is formulated as an optimization problem. Lower and upper bounds on the capacity are provided by numerical algorithms based on partitioning of the feasible region. Both bounds are shown to converge and give the exact capacity when number of regions increases. The bounds are also used to construct a monotonic optimization algorithm based on the branch-and-bound approach. An efficient suboptimal algorithm based on successive convex approximation performing close to the capacity is also presented. Numerical results show that the performance of the solution obtained from the suboptimal algorithm is close to that of the global optimal solution. Simulation results also show that in the low SNR regime, antenna selection provides performance that is close to the optimal scheme while at high SNR, uniform power allocation performs close to the optimal scheme.Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council (VR); ELLIIT; CENIIT project "Power Amplifiers and Massive MIMO"