Virtual receive antenna for overloaded MIMO layered space-time system

Layered space time processing in spatial multiplexing systems requires the number of receive antennas to be equal to or larger than the number of transmit antennas. However, it is impractical for small-sized mobile units to accommodate a large number of antennas. To loosen this stringent requirement, a novel concept of virtual receive antennas (VRA) for overloaded MIMO system is presented. The VRA system architecture consists of two major parts: fractional timing offset in the transmitter and oversampling at the receive matched filter. This procedure expands the received signal dimension and thus creates virtual receive antennas. Due to these created virtual receive antennas, the minimum number of physical receive antennas could be reduced. In order to explore the potential of VRA, this paper evaluates its system capacity and performance bound. Results show that the VRA system can achieve higher ergodic capacity and outage rate than conventional overloaded MIMO system. Performance analysis also suggests a potential performance gain for the VRA system. To eliminate the created inter-symbol interference in the VRA, time domain and frequency domain equalization are utilized and evaluated. © 2012 IEEE.