Effects of Channel Estimation Errors on V-BLAST Detection

This paper investigates the effects of channel estimation errors on zero-forcing (ZF) vertical Bell laboratories layered space time (V-BLAST) detection. An analytical method is presented to derive the symbol error probability (SEP) of the signals detected at each stage. The effects of imperfect channel estimation on the SEP performance of V-BLAST detection are then studied. It is shown that ZF-VBLAST detection is very sensitive to the channel estimation errors under high signal to noise ratio (SNR). It is also shown that when optimal ordering is adopted, the effects of channel estimation errors are more significant on the latter detection stages.