Performance of Linear Receivers in Frequency-Selective MIMO Channels

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of the zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalizers in MIMO frequency selective channels under zero-padding (ZP) transmission. It was previously known that the SISO zero-forcing ZP receiver achieves full diversity; this paper shows that the MIMO version of this receiver is suboptimal in diversity. The MMSE ZP is also investigated, showing that it exhibits an intricate error behavior that depends not only on channel memory and antenna configuration, but also on transmission rate. This behavior is fully characterized in closed form, revealing that the MMSE ZP receiver attains the (optimal) diversity of a ML receiver but only at small spectral efficiencies. Thus MMSE ZP works better than ZF ZP, but not quite as well as ML. To further improve the performance, lattice-reduction aided equalization in the frequency-selective channel is investigated. It is shown that lattice-reduction-aided zero forcing equalizer as well as MMSE equalizer achieve the maximum spatial and temporal diversity at all spectral efficiencies.