Interference sensitivity for multi-user MIMO in LTE

A recent idea of exploiting the promised gains of multi-user MIMO for future cellular standards as LTE by intelligent interference aware receivers instead of suboptimal singleuser receivers is quite promising. However this detection strategy is based on the exploitation of the structure of interference which necessitates the knowledge of the constellation and precoder of the co-scheduled user equipment (UE). As the downlink control information (DCI) in LTE is devoid of this information, we look in this paper at the sensitivity of LTE's multi-user MIMO mode to the information of co-scheduled UE. We show that exploiting the discrete nature of interference in the absence of the exact knowledge of interference constellation has significant gains as compared to the suboptimal single-user detection. To this end, we propose a blind receiver for LTE which shows significantly improved performance as compared to single-user receivers and exhibits a minor degradation as compared to interference aware receivers.