Adaptive Minimum Symbol Error Rate Beamforming Assisted Detection for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation

We consider beamforming assisted detection for multiple antenna aided multiuser systems that employ the bandwidth efficient quadrature amplitude modulation scheme. A minimum symbol error rate (MSER) design is proposed for the beamforming assisted receiver, and it is shown that this MSER design provides significant performance enhancement, in terms of achievable symbol error rate, over the standard minimum mean square error (MMSE) design. A sample-by-sample adaptive algorithm, referred to as the least symbol error rate, is derived for adaptive implementation of the MSER beamforming solution. The proposed adaptive MSER scheme is evaluated in simulation using Rayleigh fading channels, in comparison with the adaptive MMSE benchmarker.