UC Irvine

Coarsely quantized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are gaining more interest due to their power efficiency. We present a new precoding technique to mitigate the multi-user interference and the quantization distortions in a downlink multi-user MIMO system with coarsely quantized constant envelope (QCE) signals at the transmitter. The transmit signal vector is optimized for every desired received vector taking into account a relaxed version of the QCE constraint. The optimization is based on maximizing the safety margin to the decision thresholds of the receiver constellation modulation. Due to the linear property of the objective function and the constraints, the optimization problem is formulated as a linear programming problem. The simulation results show a significant gain in terms of the uncoded bit error rate compared to the existing precoding techniques.