Design & Experimental Validation of MIMO Multiuser Detection for Downlink Packet Data

In single-user MIMO communication, the first-order throughput scaling is determined by the smallest of the number of transmit and receive antennas. This typically renders terminals the constraining bottleneck. In a multiuser downlink, this bottleneck can be bypassed by having the base station communicate with multiple terminals simultaneously, in which case the receive antennas at those terminals are effectively pooled in terms of the capacity scaling. This, however, requires that the base have instantaneous channel information. Without such information, the structure and statistics of the channel can be exploited to form multiple simultaneous beams towards the various users, but these beams are in general mutually interfering. This paper proposes the use of multiuser detection to discriminate the signals conveyed over interfering beams. This approach is formulated and experimentally evaluated on an HSDPA MIMO testbed that involves a commercial base station, multiantenna terminals, and custom ASICs. The authors are with Bell Laboratories (Lucent Technologies), Holmdel, NJ07733, USA.