This book is an outgrowth of a graduate course I have taught for the past four years on MIMO Wireless Communications in the Engineering for Professionals (EP) Program within the Whiting School of Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. When I began to develop the course in the spring of 2006, I initially thought I would simply choose a textbook from the collection of numerous books that had been written on MIMO communications at that time. As I began studying these books, however, I found that, although they were each excellent in various ways, none of them was as accessible to the average practicing communications engineer or early level electrical engineering graduate student as I had hoped. Many of these books were written by experts in the field, researchers who had made seminal contributions in the area of MIMO communications, but the prerequisites needed to follow and understand the details in their presentations were often above the level of expertise of those being introduced to MIMO for the first time.

This book is my attempt to remedy this problem. In developing the course and in writing this book, I have tried to make the concepts and techniques associated with MIMO communications accessible to an average communications engineer with an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. I assume that readers are familiar with digital communication techniques and that they have had a formal course (or its equivalent) in digital signal processing; however, I do not assume readers are familiar with information theory or are proficient in advanced matrix mathematics, areas of expertise that are normally assumed in the MIMO literature and in many of the books that have been published on this topic. When knowledge in these areas is required to understand MIMO concepts, I have attempted to include the necessary information on those topics in the book so that it is not necessary to consult external resources. In this sense, the book has been designed to be as self-contained as possible.