Constellation-Oriented Perturbation for Scalable-Complexity MIMO Nonlinear Precoding

In this paper, a novel nonlinear precoding (NLP) technique, namely constellation-oriented perturbation (COP), is proposed to tackle the scalability problem inherent in conventional NLP techniques. The basic concept of COP is to apply vector perturbation (VP) in the constellation domain instead of symbol domain; as often used in conventional techniques. By this means, the computational complexity of COP is made independent to the size of multi-antenna (i.e., MIMO) networks. Instead, it is related to the size of symbol constellation. Through widely linear transform, it is shown that COP has its complexity flexibly scalable in the constellation domain to achieve a good complexity-performance tradeoff. Our computer simulations show that COP can offer very comparable performance with the optimum VP in small MIMO systems. Moreover, it significantly outperforms current sub-optimum VP approaches (such as degree-2 VP) in large MIMO whilst maintaining much lower computational complexity.