On Equal Constellation Minimum BER linear MIMO Transceivers

Linear MIMO transceivers (composed of a linear precoder at the transmitter and a linear equalizer at the receiver) are a low-complexity approach to optimize the spectral efficiency and/or the reliability of the communication, when perfect channel state information is available at both sides of the link. The design of linear transceivers has been extensively studied in the literature with a variety of cost functions. In this paper we focus on the minimum BER design, and show that the common practice of fixing a priori the number of transmitted data symbols per channel use inherently limits the diversity gain of the system. Finally, we propose a minimum BER linear precoding scheme that achieves the full diversity of the MIMO channel.