ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to study the feasibility of MU-MIMO techniques for PLC. It investigates the MU-MIMO algorithms that are limited to linear algorithms. TDD with BF serves as reference for the performance evaluation of the MU-MIMO algorithms in the chapter. One form of linear precoding is based on block diagonalisation (BD), and the chapter focuses in particular on multi-user orthogonal space division multiplexing (MOSDM) and an iterative computation of this algorithm which is NuSVD. The chapter explains BD in detail since the algorithms yielding the best simulation results for the PLC environment belong to this group. It discusses that the number of spatial streams per link is limited due to constraints imposed by the interference cancellation. The chapter analyses the suitability of MU-MIMO algorithms to MIMO PLC systems and the benefits and improvements that they could bring to the PLC system.
