Constant Envelope Precoding for Power-Efficient Downlink Wireless Communication in Multi-User MIMO Systems Using Large Antenna Arrays

We consider downlink cellular multi-user communication between a base station (BS) having N antennas and M single-antenna users, i.e., an N X M Gaussian Broadcast Channel (GBC). Under an average only total transmit power constraint (APC), large antenna arrays at the BS (having tens to a few hundred antennas) have been recently shown to achieve remarkable multi-user interference (MUI) suppression with simple precoding techniques. However, building large arrays in practice, would require cheap/power-efficient Radio-Frequency(RF) electronic components. The type of transmitted signal that facilitates the use of most power-efficient RF components is a constant envelope (CE) signal. Under certain mild channel conditions (including i.i.d. fading), we analytically show that, even under the stringent per-antenna CE transmission constraint (compared to APC), MUI suppression can still be achieved with large antenna arrays. Our analysis also reveals that, with a fixed M and increasing N, the total transmitted power can be reduced while maintaining a constant signal-to-interference-noise-ratio (SINR) level at each user. We also propose a novel low-complexity CE precoding scheme, using which, we confirm our analytical observations for the i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channel, through Monte-Carlo simulations. Simulation of the information sum-rate under the per-antenna CE constraint, shows that, for a fixed M and a fixed desired sum-rate, the required total transmit power decreases linearly with increasing N, i.e., an O(N) array power gain. Also, in terms of the total transmit power required to achieve a fixed desired information sum-rate, despite the stringent per-antenna CE constraint, the proposed CE precoding scheme performs close to the GBC sum-capacity (under APC) achieving scheme.