Capacity and performance of MIMO-BICM with zero-forcing receivers

This work considers multiple-input multiple-output bit-interleaved coded modulation (MIMO-BICM) with linear zero-forcing (ZF) receivers. We derive the link-level capacity (LLC) under ideal fast-fading conditions, and show that it approaches the maximum-likelihood (ML) LLC as the number of receive antennas approach infinity. We also derive tight analytical bounds on the coded bit-error rate, and prove that with N_t transmit and N_r receive antennas, the diversity order is N_r-N_t+1 multiplied by the free Hamming distance of the convolutional code. For the case of a ML receiver, we show that a tight bound is not possible, in general. Our analysis provides insights to explain the relative performance of the ZF and ML receivers. Finally, we validate the analytical results and assess the performance in a practical environment with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing and channel estimation.