Richardson Method Based Linear Precoding with

Low Complexity for Massive MIMO Systems

Zhaohua Lu1 , Jiaqi Ning2 , Yi Zhang3 , Tian Xie3 , Wenqian Shen3
1 ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen, China
2 Institute of Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
3 Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList),

Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing, China

E-mail: razor9321@163.com

AbstractFor massive MIMO system with hundreds of anten-
nas at the base station (BS), zero forcing (ZF) precoding can
achieve the near-optimal capacity due to the asymptotically or-
thogonal channel, but it involves complicated matrix inversion of
large size. In this paper, we propose a Richardson Method (RM)
based precoding to avoid the complicated matrix inversion in an
iterative way, which can reduce the complexity by one order of
magnitude. We also prove that the optimal relaxation parameter
to RM can be approached by a simple and quantified value to
maximize the convergence rate of RM-based precoding, which
only depends on the number of BS antennas and the number
of users. Simulation results show that RM-based precoding can
achieve the near-optimal performance of ZF precoding with only
a small number of iterations.
I. I NTRODUCTION
precoding based on Neumann series approximation algorithm
was proposed recently [9]. The Neumann-based precoding can
reduce the complexity by converting the matrix inversion into a
series of matrix-vector multiplications. However, the reduction
in complexity is not obvious.
In this paper, we propose a near-optimal linear precoding
based on the Richardson Method (RM) [10] for massive
MIMO. The proposed RM-based precoding can precode the
transmitted signal in an simple iterative way which can avoid
the complicated matrix inversion of large-size. We also prove
that the optimal relaxation parameter to RM can be approached
by a simple and quantified value, which only depends on the
MIMO configuration (i.e., the number of BS antennas and the
number of users), to maximize the convergence rate of RM-

M Assive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has

been considered as a promising technology for the next
wireless communication systems [1], [2]. Unlike the traditional
small-scale MIMO (e.g., at most 8 antennas in downlink
for LTE-A [3]), massive MIMO usually equips hundreds of
antennas at the base station (BS) to simultaneously serve a
set of users. It has been proved in theory that massive MIMO
can simultaneously achieve orders of increase in spectrum and
energy efficiency [4], [5].
However, the increased number of antennas makes massive
MIMO faced with several challenging problems in prac-
tice. One of which is the low-complexity precoding in the
downlink [6]. The nonlinear optimal precoding is dirty paper
coding (DPC) [7], which can achieve the ideal capacity by
subtracting the potential interferences before transmission, but
it usually involves quite high complexity for massive MIMO.
The other nonlinear precoding schemes, such as lattice-aided
precoding [8], can achieve the close-optimal capacity with
reduced complexity, but their are still unaffordable when the
dimension of the MIMO system is large or the modulation
order is high (e.g., 256 antennas at the BS with 64 QAM
modulation). Fortunately, since for massive MIMO systems,
the columns of channel matrix are asymptotically orthogo-
nal [6], the linear precoding schemes, such as zero forcing
(ZF) precoding, can also achieve the near-optimal capacity,
which makes a better trade-off between the complexity and
the performance. However, these schemes require to compute
unfavorable matrix inversion of large size, together with a
large number of division operations. To solve this problem, ZF
based precoding. Analysis shows that our method can reduce
the complexity by one order of magnitude and simulation
results verify that RM-based precoding can achieve the near-
optimal performance with only a small number of iterations.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
briefly introduces the system model. Section III specifies the
proposed RM-based precoding scheme, together with analy-
sis of how to select the optimal relaxation parameter. The
simulation results in terms of the achievable channel capacity
are shown in Section IV. Finally, conclusions are drawn in
Section V.
Notation: Lower-case and upper-case boldface letters denote
vectors and matrices, respectively; ()T , ()H , ()1 , det(),
and tr() denote the transpose, conjugate transpose, inversion,
determinant, and trace of a matrix, respectively; F and 2
denote the Frobenius norm of a matrix and the 2-norm of
a vector, respectively; || and () denote the absolute and
conjugate operators, respectively; Finally, IN is the N N
identity matrix.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
As shown in Fig. 1, we consider a massive MIMO system
employing N antennas at the BS to serve K single-antenna
users [6]. In such system, we usually have N  K, e.g.,
N = 256 and K = 16 [6]. The received K 1 signal vector
y, which includes the received signals from all K users, can
be denoted by
y = f Ht + n, (1)

978-1-4799-8088-8/15/$31.00 2015 IEEE

 N
MIMO enable us to obtain the precoded signal vector t, or
equivalently s in (3) with low complexity. Since for massive
User 1 MIMO, the columns of channel matrix are asymptotically
orthogonal [6], the matrix W can be guaranteed to be Her-
mitian positive definite. This fact inspires us to exploit RM
to efficiently solve (3) without complicated matrix inversion.
User 2
The RM is used to solve the linear equation Ax = b, where
A is the N N Hermitian positive definite matrix, x is
the N 1 solution vector, and b is the N 1 measurement
vector. Unlike the traditional method that directly computes
User K-1 A1 b to obtain x, RM can solve the equation Ax = b in
a simple iterative way with low complexity. Correspondingly,
by exploiting RM, we can compute s by [18]
User K
Fig. 1. Massive MIMO in the downlink. s(i+1) = (IK W) s(i) + s, i = 0, 1, (4)

where f is the downlink signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where the superscript i denotes the number of iterations, s(0)
H CKN is Rayleigh fading channel matrix, which can is the initial solution, which can be usually selected as the
be usually achieved by time-domain and/or frequency-domain zero-vector due to no a prior information is available [19],
training pilots [11][16], n of size K 1 is the additive [20], is the relaxation parameter, which plays an important
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) vector, whose entries follow role in the convergence and convergence rate. It has been
CN (0, 1), t = Ps is the N 1 signal vector for actual trans- proved that when matrix W is Hermitian positive definite
2
mission after precoding, where P is the N K precoding and 0 < < max , where max is the largest eigenvalue of
matrix, s of size K 1 is the original signal for all K users matrix W, RM-based precoding is convergent for any initial
to be transmitted. solutions [10]. The impact of relaxation parameter on the
The classical ZF precoding is a scheme by which BS convergence rate will be discussed in the following sub-
can completely eliminate the multiuser interferences. The ZF section. Note that after the final solution s(i+1) is obtained,
precoding matrix PZF can be presented as [6] the precoded signal vector for transmission can be achieved
by
PZF = H , (2) t = HH s(i+1) . (5)
H H 1 H 1
where H = H (HH ) = H W denotes the pseudo-
of the channel
inversion matrix H, here we define W=HHH , B. Selection of the optimal relaxation parameter
K
ZF = tr(W 1 ) N K [17] is the normalized parame- In this part, we will first analyze the approximation error
ter to average the fluctuations in transmit power. The precoded induced by RM, which can be presented as
signal vector t for transmission can be obtained as    
s(i+1) s = B s(i) s = = Bi+1 s(0) s , (6)
t = HH W1 s = HH s, (3)
where B = IK W is the iteration matrix of RM. The
where we define s = W1 s.
approximation error can be evaluated as
For downlink massive MIMO systems, it has been verified      
 (i+1)   
that ZF precoding can achieve the capacity close to the optimal s s = Bi+1 F s(0) s , (7)
DPC precoding [6]. However, the ZF precoding involves 2 2

matrix inversion W1 of large size, and the computational which means that the final approximation
 error induced by
complexity of W1 is O(K 3 ), including a large number of RM is mainly affected by B(i+1)  . However, the direct
  F
division operations, which is high since K is usually large in computation of B(i+1) F is complicated, since the iteration
massive MIMO systems. matrix B is a random matrix and it is hard to obtain the joint
distribution of all the elements. Fortunately, it has been proved
III. L OW-C OMPLEXITY L INEAR P RECODING S CHEME F OR in [10] that when i go infinity, we have the following equation
M ASSIVE MIMO  1/(i+1)
 
In this section, we propose a RM-based precoding scheme lim B(i+1)  = (B) , (8)
i F
with low complexity. After that, the convergence rate and the
selection of the optimal relaxation parameter involved in RM where (B) = max |n | and n are the spectral radius and
1nK
is analyzed. Finally, we provide the complexity analysis of the nth eigenvalue of iteration matrix B, respectively. (8)
the proposed scheme to show its advantages over the recently implies that we can regard (B) as the asymptotic conver-
proposed Neumann-based precoding scheme. gence rate of RM, and a smaller (B) will lead to a faster
convergence rate.
A. RM-based precoding scheme According to the definition B = IK W, the spectral
radius (B) will depend on the relaxation parameter as
Although calculating W1 involves high complexity as
mentioned above, fortunately, the special properties of massive (B) = max {|1 max | , |1 min |} , (9)
 TABLE I
0.035 Optimal relaxation parameter
C OMPLEXITY C OMPARISON
Quantified relaxation parameter Iterative Neumann-based Proposed RM-based
number precoding [9] precoding
0.03
i=2 2K 2 K 2K 2 + 2K
i=3 K3 3K 2 + 3K
Relaxation paramter

0.025 i=4 2K 3 K 2 4K 2 + 4K
i=5 3K 3 2K 2 5K 2 + 5K
0.02

W = HHH , we compare the computational complexity after

0.015
the matrix W has been obtained.
It can be found from (4) that in the ith iteration, RM-
0.01
based precoding involves one multiplication of the K K
matrix W and the K 1 vector s(i) , together with one
0.005 multiplication of the constant relaxation parameter proposed
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 above and the K 1 vector s. Therefore, the required number
=N/K
of multiplications to compute (4) for each iteration is K 2 + K.
Fig. 2. Comparison between the optimal and quantified relaxation parameter The complexity comparison between the recently proposed
against = N/K (K is fixed as K = 16).
Neumann-based precoding [9] and our RM-based precoding
where max and min denote the largest and smallest eigen- is summarized in Table I. Note that the complexity of ZF
value of matrix W=HHH , respectively. Since should precoding is O(K 3 ). Therefore, we can conclude from Table
2 I that the Neumann-based precoding can reduce the complexity
also satisfy 0 < < max to guarantee the convergence of
RM, we can conclude that when max 1 = 1 min , the from O(K 3 ) to O(K 2 ) when the number of iterations is
smallest spectral radius (B) can be achieved and so as the i = 2, but its complexity is still O(K 3 ) when i 3. Usually, a
fastest convergence rate, which means the optimal relaxation large number of iterations is required (as will be verified later
parameter opt is in Section IV) by Neumann-based precoding to ensure the
approximation performance. Thus, although Neumann-based
2
. opt = (10) precoding does not require any division operation which is
max + min difficult for hardware implementation [6], [9], its complexity
Next, we propose a simple and quantified optimal relaxation may be even larger than ZF precoding. In contrast, we can
parameters , which can approach the optimal relaxation observe that the complexity of RM-based precoding is O(K 2 )
parameter opt with a negligible performance loss. Note that for an arbitrary number of iterations. Additionally, from (4)
the matrix W is a central Wishart matrix with the freedom we can also observe that: i) RM-based precoding requires
N [17]. It has been proved that when N go infinity, the no division operations; ii) RM-based precoding can be easily
largest and smallest eigenvalue of W will converge to the realized in a parallel way.
deterministic values as [17]
 2 IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS

max = N 1 + K N , To evaluate the performance of RM-based precoding, we
  2 (11) provide the simulation results in terms of the achievable chan-
min = N 1 K N . nel capacity, compared with the recently proposed Neumann-
based precoding [9]. We also take the achievable channel
Therefore, for massive MIMO where the number of BS
capacity of ZF precoding with exact matrix inversion and
antennas is large enough, the optimal relaxation parameter opt
the optimal DPC precoding as the benchmarks for com-
of RM-based precoding can be well approached by
parison. Two typical massive MIMO configurations with
2 N N K = 256 16 and N K = 256 32 are considered,
=  2  2  , = . (12)
K respectively. The modulation scheme of 64 QAM is employed,
N 1+ 1 + 1 1
and the Rayleigh fading channel model is adopted.
Fig. 2 shows the difference between the optimal and quan- Fig. 3 shows the achievable channel capacity comparison
tified relaxation parameter against = N/K, while K between Neumann-based precoding and RM-based precoding.
is fixed as K = 16. From Fig. 2, we can observe that the The MIMO configuration is N K = 256 16. It is clear
proposed quantified is quite close to the optimal relaxation from Fig. 3 that ZF precoding is capacity-approaching, since
parameter opt , especially when the number of BS antennas its performance gap to the optimal DPC precoding is within
N is large. 0.5 dB to achieved the same capacity. In addition, we can
observe that as the number of iterations i increases, the
C. Complexity analysis performance of both Neumann-based precoding and RM-based
In this section, we provide the complexity analysis of the precoding improves. However, when the same number of
RM-based precoding, which is evaluated in terms of the iterations i is used, the proposed scheme outperforms the
required number of complex multiplications and divisions, Neumann-based one. For example, when i = 4, the required
since the computational complexity is dominated by these SNR to achieve the capacity of 200 bps/Hz by the proposed
two operations. Besides, due to the fact that both ZF precod- scheme is 28 dB, while the Neumann-based one requires the
ing and the proposed RM-based precoding need to compute SNR of 30 dB.
 240
Neumannbased precoding, i=2
Neumannbased precoding, i=3
220
Neumannbased precoding, i=4
Neumannbased precoding, i=5
200 RMbased precoding, i=2
RMbased precoding, i=3
RMbased precoding, i=4
180 RMbased precoding, i=5
Capacity (bps/Hz)
ZF precoding
DPC precoding
160
140
120
100
80
60
0 5 10 15 20 25
SNR (dB)
Fig. 3. Capacity comparison between Neumann-based precoding and RM-
based precoding for the 256 16 massive MIMO system.
Fig. 4 shows the achievable channel capacity
comparison between the two precoding schemes when
N K = 256 32. Comparing Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, we can
find that with a decreasing value of = N/K, the gain
achieved by RM-based precoding compared to Neumann-
based precoding is more obvious. For example, when i = 4
and SNR = 30 dB, for 256 16 MIMO system, RM-based
precoding enjoys 5 bps/Hz gain compared to Neumann-based
precoding, while for 256 32 MIMO system, the gain
achieved by RM-based precoding is increased to 40 bps/Hz.
Moreover, when the number of iterations is relatively large
(e.g., i = 5 in Fig. 3), the proposed RM-based precoding
without the complicated matrix inversion can approach the
channel capacity of the optimal DPC precoding with negligi-
ble performance loss. More importantly, considering the low
complexity of RM-based precoding as shown in Table I, we
can conclude that the proposed scheme achieves a much better
trade-off between performance and complexity.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we propose a RM-based precoding to reduce
the complexity of ZF precoding from O(K 3 ) to O(K 2 ). A
quantified relaxation parameter is also proposed to maximize
the convergence rate of RM-based precoding. Simulation re-
sults verify that our method outperforms the recently proposed
Neumann-based precoding, and achieves the near-optimal
performance of ZF precoding with only a small number of
iterations.
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