Smart Beamforming for Wireless Communications: A Novel Minimum Bit Error Rate Approach

Spatial processing with adaptive antenna array has shown real promise for substantial capacity enhancement in wireless communications. We propose a novel beamforming technique based on the minimum bit error rate (MBER) criterion. It is demonstrated that the MBER approach utilizes the system resource, the antenna elements, more intelligently than the standard minimum mean square error (MMSE) approach. Consequently, the MBER beamforming can provide significant performance gain in terms of smaller bit error rate (BER) over the MMSE beamforming.