A generalised method is derived to compute the error probabilities of singular value decomposition (SVD)-based receivers for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with uncoded transmission. The method can be used for a wide class of flat fading environments, including independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and semi-correlated Rayleigh and i.i.d. Ricean channels. Although the method is applied to equal-power binary phase shift keying, it can easily be extended to higher-order M-ary phase shift keying (M-PSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) signal constellations and adaptive 'water-filling' schemes. The error probability curves derived from closed-form formulas and simulations demonstrate very close agreement. The error performances of channel inversion, minimum mean square error and zero forcing receivers are compared with the SVD receiver for a single-user system. The impact of multiple users is considered by studying the performance of an adaptive MIMO SVD transmission scheme operating in a cellular environment. In particular, the effect of inter-cell interference on the performance of the scheme is quantified, modelling the interference as increased Gaussian noise. A number of cellular layouts are examined and the impact of the resulting singal-to-interference and noise ratio on the constellation sizes that can be supported, the BER and so on is considered. The primary metric used for our performance analysis is the error-free transmission rate, which is derived for our adaptive system. For the cellular scenarios considered, it can be found that the effect of interference is considerable and the performance of the adaptive MIMO SVD scheme is only marginally better than that provided by conventional diversity methods.
IntroductionThe pioneering work of Telatar [1] and Foschini and Gans [2] has resulted in immense interest in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. They offer the promise of large system capacities, and thus are being considered for fourth generation wireless systems. However, the majority of work in this area has focussed on single-user MIMO systems, and recent results [3] suggest that the promised rates may not be available in cellular systems. Hence, in this paper we study the performance of both fixed and adaptive MIMO singular value decomposition (SVD) transmission schemes in a cellular environment and make the following contributions: † We present a generalised method that can be used to derive the exact symbol-error probability of fixed SVD-based MIMO receivers using uncoded transmission. We demonstrate the method for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and semi-correlated Rayleigh and i.i.d. Ricean channels. Our results provide new insights in understanding the error performance of MIMO systems. For example, when the number of antennas is increased from two to four at both the transmit and receive ends, although the ergodic capacity increases, the error performance degrades. Hence, we are able to quantify the tradeoff betw...