Multi-User Linear Precoding in Massively Distributed Polarized Antenna Systems Under Imperfect CSIT

This paper presents multi-user (MU) linear precoding methods for massively distributed antenna system (DAS) with polarized antennas, where mobile stations (MSs) are spatially grouped and the distributed antenna (DA) ports with a polarized-antenna are connected to a central base station (BS). While the (slowly-changing) long-term channel state information (CSI) (i.e., large scale fading and polarization) can be accurately estimated at the transmit-side, the short-term CSI (instantaneous channel response) is available at the transmit-side with quantization errors due to the limited feedback. Accordingly, the utilization of a large number of DA ports is not always beneficial due to the imperfect short-term CSI at the transmitter (CSIT). In this paper, we first derive the asymptotic achievable rate and signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR) for the MU linear precoding in the massive DAS, which depends on the long-term CSIT and the number of feedback bits, and propose a transmit DA port selection based on the asymptotic SLNR performance. Here, the number of selected DA ports can be also optimized according to the long-term CSIT and the number of feedback bits. Furthermore, we also propose a polarization selection strategy at each DA port (equipped with multi-polarized antennas) so as to exploit the polarization diversity. Through the simulation, we confirm that the proposed MU precoding with the DA port selection outperforms the conventional precoding schemes for the DAS and, furthermore, the proposed polarization selection strategy achieves a rate performance comparable to the DAS with a (single polarized antenna) node density twice as large.