A Fine-Grained Analysis of Time Reversal MU-MISO Systems Over Correlated Multipath Channels With Imperfect CSI

Time reversal (TR) is regarded as a potential future transmission scheme for multi-user (MU) multiple-input single-output (MISO) ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. In spite of TR’s good performance in MU-MISO UWB systems, it suffers from performance degradation due to spatial correlation and imperfect channel-state information. In this paper, a comprehensive performance analysis of MU-MISO UWB systems with a TR pre-filter is provided. Both spatial correlation and channel estimation errors (CEE) are taken into account in the propagation channel model, and the system performance is mainly studied in terms of its effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), channel capacity, and bit error rate. The novel closed-form expressions for the average effective SINR are derived in order to characterize the influence of propagation conditions such as channel impulse response duration, spatial correlation, and CEE on TR performance metrics. The expressions reveal more precisely to us that spatial correlation and CEE have different effects on the average power of the desired signal, inter-symbol interference, and inter-user interference. Moreover, the impacts of spatial correlation and CEE on the performance of MU-MISO TR system are thoroughly investigated. In particular, the capacity loss of MU-MISO TR system due to spatial correlation and CEE is quantified and fully discussed at the end of this paper. It is shown that high spatial correlation and CEE cause a remarkable reduction in bandwidth efficiency. Finally, all theoretical results are confirmed by numerical simulations.