A major drawback with linear precoding in a downlink multi-user MIMO system is the increase in the transmit power when a channel is correlated. On the other hand, nonlinear trellis precoding in downlink multi-user MIMO systems is capable of minimizing the transmit power by adding a shaping sequence to the original transmit sequence. However, conventional trellis precoding cannot be directly applied to existing bit-interleaved coded MIMO-OFDM systems since the trellis precoding and error correcting codes should be designed separately. In this paper, we proposed to embed trellis precoding into the error correcting codes that are used in the original multi-user MIMO-OFDM system employing linear precoding. Major advantage of this approach is that the receiving procedure at user terminals designed for the original system need not be changed up to the error correcting decoder to support our trellis precoding. Computer simulations show that the proposed trellis precoding provides improvements of 2 dB and 2.5 dB in 22 and 33 MIMO configurations, respectively.

We discuss the spectral efficiency of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) signals widely adopted in practical systems from a viewpoint of their power spectral density property. Since the conventional OFDM does not make use of pulse shaping filter, its out-of-band (OOB) spectrum may not be negligible especially when the number of subcarriers is small. Thus, in practice, windowing is applied to mitigate OOB emission by smoothing the transition of consecutive OFDM symbols, but its effectiveness has not been well investigated. Furthermore, OFDM signal suffers from nonlinear distortion associated with its high signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which also leads to OOB radiation. We examine how power amplifier nonlinearity affects the spectral efficiency based on the theoretical results developed in the literature.

A novel block coding scheme based on complementary sequences which is capable of both error correction and peak to average power ratio reduction has been proposed for M-ary PSK multicarrier systems. Generator matrices for the number of carriers N = 2k where k = 2,3,...are derived. The effectiveness of the scheme has been confirmed by computer simulations.