The University of British Columbia

We address the problem of designing a linear precoder for space-time coded multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with imperfect knowledge of channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), subject to a total transmit power constraint. Assuming an uncorrelated flat-fading channel and using a maximum likelihood decoder at the receiver, we analytically reveal that the derived precoder is a function of the noise variance, the eigenvalues of the estimated channel matrix and the eigenvalues of the codeword distance matrix. Furthermore, the power allocation on the eigenvalues of the precoder is shown to follow the water-pouring policy and hence the proposed precoder allocates more power to the stronger channels.