Exact dual-user macrodiversity performance with linear receivers in flat Rayleigh fading

The performance of linear receivers in the presence of co-channel interference (CCI) in Rayleigh channels is a fundamental problem in wireless communications. Performance evaluation for these systems is well-known for receive arrays which are co-located. In contrast, there are almost no analytical results available for macrodiversity systems (such as network MIMO) where both the sources and receive antennas are widely separated. In general, this appears to be an extremely difficult problem. However, progress is possible for the two-user scenario. In this paper, we derive closed form results for the probability density function (pdf) and cumulative distribution function (cdf) of the output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) of minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and zero forcing (ZF) receivers in independent Rayleigh channels with arbitrary numbers of receive antennas. The results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations. The results enable further system analysis such as the evaluation of outage probabilities, bit error rate (BER) and capacity.