Pseudo MIMO for Wireless Communications: Fundamentals, Modeling, and Optimization

This paper presents a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. The system, termed as “pseudo MIMO”, facilitates the transmission of more parallel data streams than the number of receiving radio frequency (RF) chains. The key principle involves connecting multiple antenna elements to each receiving RF chain and employing multiple analog combining patterns for signal reception within the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sampling period. Through detailing the entire transmission and signal processing procedures by matrix manipulation, the equivalent channel matrix for each OFDM subcarrier is derived in a unified matrix form, which can be further represented by the product of the analog combining matrix and the frequency domain wireless channel matrix. As per the equivalent channel matrix, an optimization problem is formulated and solved to maximize the spectral efficiency by jointly designing the digital precoding and analog combining matrices. Numerical results demonstrate that the performance of a pseudo MIMO system can closely approach that of a fully digital (FD) MIMO system with the same antenna configuration but more RF chains. It is also revealed that a low-precision discrete analog combining scheme is sufficient to achieve nearly optimal performance. Further, the effectiveness of pseudo MIMO technology is validated through prototype testing.