Joint transceiver design for MIMO communications using geometric mean decomposition

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the joint optimal transceiver design for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems. In this paper, we propose a joint transceiver design that combines the geometric mean decomposition (GMD) with either the conventional zero-forcing VBLAST decoder or the more recent zero-forcing dirty paper precoder (ZFDP). Our scheme decomposes a MIMO channel into multiple identical parallel subchannels, which can make it rather convenient to design modulation/demodulation and coding/decoding schemes. Moreover, we prove that our scheme is asymptotically optimal for (moderately) high SNR in terms of both channel throughput and bit error rate (BER) performance. This desirable property is not shared by any other conventional schemes. We also consider the subchannel selection issues when some of the subchannels are too poor to be useful. Our scheme can also be combined with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for intersymbol interference (ISI) suppression. The effectiveness of our approaches has been validated by both theoretical analyses and numerical simulations.