A Survey on MIMO Transmission With Finite Input Signals: Technical Challenges, Advances, and Future Trends

Multiple antennas have played an essential role in spatial multiplexing and diversity transmission for a wide range of communication applications. Most advances in the design of high-speed wireless multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems have been based on information-theoretic principles that demonstrate how to efficiently transmit signals conforming to Gaussian distribution. However, although the Gaussian signal is capacity-achieving, practical systems transmit signals belonging to finite and discrete constellations. Therefore, capacity-achieving transceiver processing based on a Gaussian input signal can be quite suboptimal for practical MIMO systems with discrete constellation input signals. To address this shortcoming, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of MIMO transmission design with finite input signals. It first summarizes existing fundamental results for MIMO systems with finite input…