Coordinated multi-point transmission strategies for TDD systems with non-ideal channel reciprocity

This paper studies transmission strategies for downlink time division duplex coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems with non-ideal uplink-downlink channel reciprocity, where several multi-antenna base stations (BSs) jointly serve multiple single-antenna users. Due to the inherent antenna calibration errors among different BSs, the uplink-downlink channels are no longer reciprocal such that the channel information at the BSs is with multiplicative noises. To mitigate the performance degradation caused by the imperfect channels, we employ a weighted sum rate estimate as the objective function for robust precoder design. To show the impact of data sharing on the performance of CoMP under the non-ideal channel reciprocity, we provide a unified framework for designing precoder for CoMP systems with different amount of data sharing. The optimal parametric linear precoder structure that maximizes the weighted sum rate estimate under per-BS power constraints is characterized, based on which a closed-form robust signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) precoder is proposed to exploit the statistics of the calibration errors. Simulation results show that the proposed precoder in conjunction with user scheduling provides substantial performance gain over Non-CoMP transmission and the CoMP transmission with non-robust precoders.