Spectral Efficiency of Precoded 5G-NR in Single and Multi-User Scenarios under Imperfect Channel Knowledge: A Comprehensive Guide for Implementation

Digital precoding techniques have been widely applied in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems to enhance spectral efficiency (SE) which is crucial in 5G New Radio (NR). Therefore, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has developed codebook-based MIMO precoding strategies to achieve a good trade-off between performance, complexity, and signal overhead. This paper aims to evaluate the performance bounds in SE achieved by the 5G-NR precoding matrices in single-user (SU) and multi-user (MU) MIMO systems, namely Type I and Type II, respectively. The implementation of these codebooks is covered providing a comprehensive guide with a detailed analysis. The performance of the 5G-NR precoder is compared with theoretical precoding techniques such as singular value decomposition (SVD) and block-diagonalization to quantify the margin of improvement of the standardized methods. Several configurations of antenna arrays, number of antenna ports, and parallel data streams are considered for simulations. Moreover, the effect of channel estimation errors on the system performance is analyzed in both SU and MU-MIMO cases. For a realistic framework, the SE values are obtained for a practical deployment based on a clustered delay line (CDL) channel model. These results provide valuable insights for system designers about the implementation and performance of the 5G-NR precoding matrices.