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