A single-carrier frequency-domain SDMA basestation

Two major technical challenges in the design of future broadband wireless networks are the impairments of the propagation channel and the need for spectral efficiency. We previously proposed a combined OFDM/SDMA approach that mitigates the channel impairments by orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with cyclic prefix insertion and that achieves a high spectral efficiency by space division multiple access (SDMA). However, because of the multicarrier modulation, this approach requires high-backoff power amplifiers in the analog frontend. We present a SC-FD-SDMA basestation, which avoids these expensive amplifiers by using constant-envelope single-carrier (SC) modulation and still features the advantages of frequency-domain (FD) multipath mitigation and SDMA. We pay special attention to the initialization of such basestation and its fixed point requirements, since they are critical aspects of any realistic implementation. A case-study shows how SC-FD-SDMA enables a 100 Mbps wireless LAN with a bandwidth efficiency of 8 bps/Hz and an uncoded BER of 10/sup -3/ at 13.5 dB.