Maximum Diversity of MIMO-OFDM Schemes with Linear Equalizers

MIMO-OFDM has been widely adopted for next generation communications because of its capability to boost the transmission rate and performance. For MIMO-OFDM systems, many designs successfully exploit the space-multipath diversity when maximum likelihood (ML) or near-ML detector, with its concomitant high complexity, is adopted at the receiver. In this paper, we quantify the performance of conventional linear equalizers for MIMO-OFDM designs. We also propose lattice-reduction (LR) aided linear equalizers to boost the performance of linear equalizers, and show that LR-aided linear equalizers achieve the same diversity order as that collected by ML detector, but with much reduced complexity. Simulation results corroborate the theoretical findings