Optimal transmitter eigen-beamforming and space-time block coding based on channel correlations

Optimal transmitter designs obeying the water-filling principle are well-documented, and widely applied when the propagation channel is deterministically known and regularly updated at the transmitter. Because channel state information may be costly or impossible to acquire in rapidly varying wireless environments, we develop in this paper statistical water-filling approaches for stationary random fading channels. The resulting optimal designs require only knowledge of the channel's second order statistics that do not require frequent updates, and can be easily acquired. Optimality refers to minimizing a tight bound on the symbol error rate. Applied to a multiple transmit-antenna paradigm, the optimal precoder turns out to be a generalized eigen-beamformer with multiple beams pointing to orthogonal directions along the eigenvectors of the channel's covariance matrix, and with proper power loading across the beams. Coupled with orthogonal space time block codes, two-directional eigen-beamforming emerges as a more attractive choice than conventional one-directional beamforming, with uniformly better performance, and without rate reduction or complexity increase.