A comparison of the MMSE detector and its V-BLAST version for a stochastic MIMO radio channel model

Theoretical and experimental studies of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio channels are presented in this paper. We investigate the performance of detection algorithms for single user wireless communication using multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver. The algorithms are based on the MMSE detector and its BLAST versions. Comparisons are made using bit error ratio (BER) versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) simulations. The system includes M transmitting antennas and N receiving antennas M ≤ N. The effects of error propagation on algorithm performance are investigated for BPSK and 16-QAM modulation schemes. A simple stochastic MIMO model channel has been used. This model uses the correlation matrices at the mobile station (MS) and the (BS) so that results of numerous single-input multiple output (SIMO) studies that have been published in the literature can be used as input parameters. In this paper, the model is simpified to consider narrowband channels.