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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes outage and error rates of ordered V-BLAST in Rayleigh fading channels, deriving bounds and approximations, and compares optimal and sub-optimal ordering strategies for different system complexities.

Contribution

It provides new bounds and approximations for outage and error rates of V-BLAST with multiple antennas, highlighting the effects of ordering and complexity.

Findings

Optimal ordering yields m-fold SNR gain for m antennas.

Sub-optimal ordering offers a trade-off with lower complexity and 3 dB SNR gain.

Uncoded D-BLAST has similar performance to V-BLAST.

Abstract

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.