Digital Predistortion Based on Combined Feedback in MIMO Transmitters

An adaptive digital predistortion (PD) technique is proposed for linearization of power amplifiers (PAs) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitters. Instead of constructing a separate feedback path at each PA, we propose a PD technique based on a combined feedback, which adds all the PAs' outputs to form a single feedback. We develop an algorithm for finding the multiple PA characteristics jointly from the combined feedback. The PD parameters are calculated from the identified PA characteristics. Although the proposed method requires more computations for PA identification than the conventional method, its hardware implementation is much simpler and can overcome the crosstalk problem of a radio frequency (RF) selector, which is necessary for multiple feedback selection. The simulation results show that, despite its simple structure, the linearization performance of the proposed method is almost the same as the separate multiple feedback method.