On the Maximal Diversity Order of Spatial Multiplexing with Transmit Antenna Selection

Zhang et. al. recently derived upper and lower bounds on the achievable diversity of an N_R x N_T i.i.d. Rayleigh fading multiple antenna system using transmit antenna selection, spatial multiplexing and a linear receiver structure. For the case of L = 2 transmitting (out of N_T available) antennas the bounds are tight and therefore specify the maximal diversity order. For the general case with L <= min(N_R,N_T) transmitting antennas it was conjectured that the maximal diversity is (N_T-L+1)(N_R-L+1) which coincides with the lower bound. Herein, we prove this conjecture for the zero forcing and zero forcing decision feedback (with optimal detection ordering) receiver structures.Comment: 10 pages. Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

On Outage and Error Rate Analysis of the Ordered V-BLAST

Outage and error rate performance of the ordered BLAST with more than 2 transmit antennas is evaluated for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels. A number of lower and upper bounds on the 1st step outage probability at any SNR are derived, which are further used to obtain accurate approximations to average block and total error rates. For m Tx antennas, the effect of the optimal ordering at the first step is an m-fold SNR gain. As m increases to infinity, the BLER decreases to zero, which is a manifestation of the space-time autocoding effect in the V-BLAST. While the sub-optimal ordering (based on the before-projection SNR) suffers a few dB SNR penalty compared to the optimal one, it has a lower computational complexity and a 3 dB SNR gain compared to the unordered V-BLAST and can be an attractive solution for low-complexity/low-energy systems. Uncoded D-BLAST exhibits the same outage and error rate performance as that of the V-BLAST. An SNR penalty of the linear receiver interfaces compared to the BLAST is also evaluated.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication