Improved Beamforming for Radio Links with Multi-Level Linearly Modulated Signals

Multiple constellations has been proposed recently as a way of improving the system performance when used in conjunction with Orthogonal Transmit Diversity (OTD) for high level linear modulation schemes. This paper considers the use of multiple constellations in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna systems. The premise is that the same modulation scheme is used with different bits to symbols mapping for each branch. This improved beamforming results in better performance as compared to MIMO-MRC where the same bits to symbols mapping is used on all branches. Analytical expression for Symbol Error Probability (SEP) is derived. The results obtained show that the new proposed improved beamforming scheme outperforms conventional MIMO-MRC with a performance dividend that increases with the linear modulation level.