Performance Analysis of Macrodiversity MIMO Systems with MMSE and ZF Receivers in Flat Rayleigh Fading

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the performance of macrodiversity MIMO systems with MMSE and ZF receivers in flat Rayleigh fading, providing approximate SNR/SINR distributions and high SNR error rate formulas for distributed antenna setups.

Contribution

It introduces approximate performance metrics for distributed macrodiversity MIMO systems with MMSE and ZF receivers, extending analysis beyond single-array configurations.

Findings

Derived approximate SNR and SINR distributions for distributed antennas.

Provided high SNR error rate approximations linking performance to link powers.

Revealed simple functional relationships between performance metrics and link SNRs.

Abstract

Consider a multiuser system where an arbitrary number of users communicate with a distributed receive array over independent Rayleigh fading paths. The receive array performs minimum mean squared error (MMSE) or zero forcing (ZF) combining and perfect channel state information is assumed at the receiver. This scenario is well-known and exact analysis is possible when the receive antennas are located in a single array. However, when the antennas are distributed, the individual links all have different average signal to noise ratio (SNRs) and this is a much more challenging problem. In this paper, we provide approximate distributions for the output SNR of a ZF receiver and the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of an MMSE receiver. In addition, simple high SNR approximations are provided for the symbol error rate (SER) of both receivers assuming M-PSK or M-QAM modulations. These high SNR results provide array gain and diversity gain information as well as a remarkably simple functional link between performance and the link powers.