Asymptotic Performance of Linear Receivers in MIMO Fading Channels

Linear receivers are an attractive low-complexity alternative to optimal processing for multi-antenna MIMO communications. In this paper we characterize the information-theoretic performance of MIMO linear receivers in two different asymptotic regimes. For fixed number of antennas, we investigate the limit of error probability in the high-SNR regime in terms of the Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff (DMT). Following this, we characterize the error probability for fixed SNR in the regime of large (but finite) number of antennas. As far as the DMT is concerned, we report a negative result: we show that both linear Zero-Forcing (ZF) and linear Minimum Mean-Square Error (MMSE) receivers achieve the same DMT, which is largely suboptimal even in the case where outer coding and decoding is performed across the antennas. We also provide an approximate quantitative analysis of the markedly different behavior of the MMSE and ZF receivers at finite rate and non-asymptotic SNR, and show that while the ZF receiver achieves poor diversity at any finite rate, the MMSE receiver error curve slope flattens out progressively, as the coding rate increases. When SNR is fixed and the number of antennas becomes large, we show that the mutual information at the output of a MMSE or ZF linear receiver has fluctuations that converge in distribution to a Gaussian random variable, whose mean and variance can be characterized in closed form. This analysis extends to the linear receiver case a well-known result previously obtained for the optimal receiver. Simulations reveal that the asymptotic analysis captures accurately the outage behavior of systems even with a moderate number of antennas.Comment: 48 pages, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Adaptive and Iterative Multi-Branch MMSE Decision Feedback Detection Algorithms for MIMO Systems

In this work, decision feedback (DF) detection algorithms based on multiple processing branches for multi-input multi-output (MIMO) spatial multiplexing systems are proposed. The proposed detector employs multiple cancellation branches with receive filters that are obtained from a common matrix inverse and achieves a performance close to the maximum likelihood detector (MLD). Constrained minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) receive filters designed with constraints on the shape and magnitude of the feedback filters for the multi-branch MMSE DF (MB-MMSE-DF) receivers are presented. An adaptive implementation of the proposed MB-MMSE-DF detector is developed along with a recursive least squares-type algorithm for estimating the parameters of the receive filters when the channel is time-varying. A soft-output version of the MB-MMSE-DF detector is also proposed as a component of an iterative detection and decoding receiver structure. A computational complexity analysis shows that the MB-MMSE-DF detector does not require a significant additional complexity over the conventional MMSE-DF detector, whereas a diversity analysis discusses the diversity order achieved by the MB-MMSE-DF detector. Simulation results show that the MB-MMSE-DF detector achieves a performance superior to existing suboptimal detectors and close to the MLD, while requiring significantly lower complexity.Comment: 10 figures, 3 tables; IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 201

Channel Hardening-Exploiting Message Passing (CHEMP) Receiver in Large-Scale MIMO Systems

In this paper, we propose a MIMO receiver algorithm that exploits {\em channel hardening} that occurs in large MIMO channels. Channel hardening refers to the phenomenon where the off-diagonal terms of the ${\bf H}^H{\bf H}$ matrix become increasingly weaker compared to the diagonal terms as the size of the channel gain matrix ${\bf H}$ increases. Specifically, we propose a message passing detection (MPD) algorithm which works with the real-valued matched filtered received vector (whose signal term becomes ${\bf H}^T{\bf H}{\bf x}$, where ${\bf x}$ is the transmitted vector), and uses a Gaussian approximation on the off-diagonal terms of the ${\bf H}^T{\bf H}$ matrix. We also propose a simple estimation scheme which directly obtains an estimate of ${\bf H}^T{\bf H}$ (instead of an estimate of ${\bf H}$), which is used as an effective channel estimate in the MPD algorithm. We refer to this receiver as the {\em channel hardening-exploiting message passing (CHEMP)} receiver. The proposed CHEMP receiver achieves very good performance in large-scale MIMO systems (e.g., in systems with 16 to 128 uplink users and 128 base station antennas). For the considered large MIMO settings, the complexity of the proposed MPD algorithm is almost the same as or less than that of the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection. This is because the MPD algorithm does not need a matrix inversion. It also achieves a significantly better performance compared to MMSE and other message passing detection algorithms using MMSE estimate of ${\bf H}$. We also present a convergence analysis of the proposed MPD algorithm. Further, we design optimized irregular low density parity check (LDPC) codes specific to the considered large MIMO channel and the CHEMP receiver through EXIT chart matching. The LDPC codes thus obtained achieve improved coded bit error rate performance compared to off-the-shelf irregular LDPC codes