Joint Precoding and Power Allocation for Multiuser MIMO System with Nonlinear Power Amplifiers

As the demand to alleviate the high cost and energy consumption problem in cellular communication systems grows, research on ways to compensate the hardware impairments for introducing low-cost devices into multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems is becoming important. In particular, the nonlinearity of power amplifiers may severely degrade the performance of MIMO systems by distorting the precoded signals. In this work, we study the performance and precoding strategy of downlink multiuser MIMO systems with nonlinear power amplifiers. First, we analyze the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of nonlinear systems to establish the relationship between the transmit power and SINR. We find that the condition for maximizing the SINR depends on the average channel gain. Specifically, the maximum SINR is determined by the uncorrelated distortion when the average channel gain is large and by the distortion of precoding vector when the average channel gain is small. Motivated by the analysis, we propose an iterative algorithm, which alternately updates the precoding and power allocation by resolving the complicated coupling factors in the SINR expressions of nonlinear system. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm implicitly controls the total transmit power so that the desired signal, interference, and distortion are properly balanced. By the simulation results, we verify the analysis results and show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional schemes and achieves a near-optimal sum rate.