MIMO Zero-Forcing Detection Analysis for Correlated and Estimated Rician Fading

Experimental modeling of wireless fading channels performed by the WINNER II project has been shown to fit a Rician rather than Rayleigh distribution, the latter being assumed in many analytical studies of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. Unfortunately, a Rician MIMO channel matrix has a nonzero mean (i.e., specular component) that yields, for the matrix product that determines the MIMO performance, a noncentral Wishart distribution that is difficult to analyze. Previously, the noncentral Wishart distribution has been approximated, based on a first-order-moment fit, by a central Wishart distribution and used to derive average error probability (AEP) expressions for zero-forcing (ZF) detection. We first reveal that this approximation and the MIMO performance evaluation tools derived from it may be reliable only for rank-one specular matrices. We then exploit this approximation to derive an AEP expression for a lesser known, yet optimal, MIMO ZF approach that, unlike the conventional approach, accounts for channel estimation accuracy through the channel statistics. After validating this AEP expression for the rank-one case, it is shown that the ZF performance averaged over realistic (i.e., WINNER II) distributions of the RicianK-factor and azimuth spread (AS) can be much worse than that for the averageKand AS. Finally, through simulations, it is shown that the optimal detection approach can substantially outperform the conventional approach for ZF for full-rank specular matrices, as well as for minimum mean square error detection for both rank-one and full-rank specular matrices.