Multiple Input Multiple

Output

MIMO
MIMO is introduced fairly recently.
Will be used in 802.11n. 802.11n will
be OFDM over MIMO.
The basic idea is simple having
multiple transmitting antennas and
multiple receiving antennas.

MIMO
First, having multiple receiving antennas means
that you can pick up more energy.
Also, when one antenna is having trouble
receiving signal, others are unlikely to be having
the same problem. That is why commercial APs
sometimes have multiple antennas also. It
compares the received signal strength from
different antennas and use the strongest one to
decode the data. Called ``antenna diversity.
As long as the antennas are sufficiently apart
from each other, the signals are likely
experiencing different fading. The space needs to
be half of the carrier wavelength. If we are using
2.4GHz, the wavelength is about 10cm.

MIMO
Having multiple transmitting antennas does not necessarily
mean that you can send more energy, because the
transmitting energy is determined by other issues, such as
your battery.
However, it does mean that you can have multiple paths
between the sender and the receiver. With nt transmitting and
nr receiving antennas, you have nt times nr paths that can be
assumed to be independent. If one path is in trouble, i.e., there
is someone in the blocking position right now, other paths are
unlikely to be in the same situation at the same time. Much
better than depending everything on only one path!
Also, what makes MIMO possible is that the receiver antennas
can operate in the linear range such that the received signal is
the ADDITON of signals from multiple transmitting antennas.
So, based on these high-level intuitions, MIMO is likely able to
improve the performance. But how exactly?

SIMO
Single Input Multiple Output.
Consider one transmitting antenna and
two receiving antennas.
Assume flat-fading, meaning that there
is no multi-path, i.e., the received
sample is relevant only to the current
data symbol. We write it as y[n]=x[n] +
w[n].
We can make this assumption because
of OFDM.

SIMO
With two receiving antennas, we will receive
that is, from the waveform received at each
antenna, we can take a sample, and call it y1
and y2, respectively. Both samples are excited
by x, but they are from different paths,
therefore their channel coefficients (i.e., h1, h2)
are different. One important thing to remember
is that the noise from both antennas are usually
assumed to be following the same distribution
and have the same power and are independent
from each other.

SIMO Receiver
For the simplest receiver, lets just add y1
with y2 and make a decision.
Is this the optimal one?
What if h1=10 while h2=1 (yes, this is possible!)?
Remember that the noises are the same
(random but following the same distribution) at
both channels). Assume the data is 1 (BPSK),
and this moment, the noises at both channels
are -6. So, we will get (10+(-6)) + (1+(-6)) =
-1, and we will think the sender sent 0!
What is the problem? If we only use the strong
channel we wont make the wrong decision!

SIMO receiver
The problem is that we are treating the
information from a good channel and a
weak channel in the same way.
The information from the strong channel
is more valuable than the weak channel.
The optimal -- Maximum Ratio
Combining (Section 3.2.1 in the Tse
book). We should weight the samples
from the antennas according to the
channel strength:

MISO
Now consider the case when the sender has
multiple antennas and the receiver has only
one antenna.
The sender has a power budget the total
transmitting power cannot exceed a
threshold.
Assume that all antennas are sending the
same data symbol at any time, so the
receiver will receive
where a1 and a2 represent the power allocated
for antenna 1 and antenna 2, respectively.

MISO
The problem is to maximize the
magnitude of the received signal
x(h1a1+h2a2) subject to the constraint
that
Any ideas?

MISO
Still maximum ratio combining. Define
Lagrange
Take the partial derivative of L over a1 and a2 :

Means that a1 and a2 should be proportional to

h1 and h2.

But this requires the sender knows the

channel not always the case.

The Altamonte Scheme

The key is that the transmitting antennas
are NOT restricted to sending the same
data symbols at the same time.
The Altamonte Scheme (Tse book Section
3.3.2). Consider two data symbols to be
sent in two consecutive symbol times, u1
and u2 . At time 1, ant1 transmits u1 and
ant2 transmits u2. At time 2, ant1
transmits u 2 and ant2 transmits u 1.
*

The Altamonte Scheme

(These two formulas are from the Tse
book.) So,
Rearrange it, we have

The Altamonte Scheme

So, we have
Note that
that is, the two vectors are orthogonal to
each other. So, to recover u1 and u2, we
can multiply
with the conjugate of either of the
vectors.

The Altamonte Scheme

So, the magnitude of the received
signal is proportional to
, even
when the transmitter is not aware of
the channel coefficient at all.
If the transmitter simply sends the
same symbol over two antennas at
the same power, the received signal is
proportional to h1 + h2 , and depends on
the phase, they may cancel each
other out!

2 by 2 MIMO
Now consider we have two
transmitting antennas and two
receiving antennas.
A simple scheme called ``V-BLAST:
Send independent data symbols over
the transmitting antennas as well as
over time.

MIMO
MIMO receiver. Will receive two
samples per time slot. hij: the channel
coefficient from Tx ant j to Rx ant i.
How to decode the data?

MIMO receiver
The simplest receiver just do a
matrix inversion:

This is NOT the optimal decoder! The

maximum likelihood decoder is
better.