Interference-aware receiver design for MU-MIMO in LTE: Real-time performance measurements

Multiuser (MU) MIMO is a promising technique to significantly increase

the cell capacity in LTE systems. However, users scheduled for MU-MIMO

may still experience strong MU interference if the channel state information

at the base station is outdated or in small cells with a limited number of users

available. To tackle the MU interference, an interference-aware (IA) receiver

design is employed. Unlike the interference-unaware (IU) receiver, the IA

receiver exploits the information about the interfering data stream in the

decoding process, resulting in a significant performance gain while maintaining

a moderate complexity. We evaluate the performance of both receivers in

terms of throughput through real-time measurements carried out with the

OpenAirInterface, an open-source hardware/software development platform

created by EURECOM. The measurement results show that the IA receiver

achieves significantly higher data rates compared to the IU receiver if the user

has multiple receive antennas.