Selective-Fading Multiple-Access MIMO Channels: Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff and Dominant Outage Event Regions

We establish the optimal diversity-multiplexing (DM) tradeoff for coherent selective-fading multipleaccess MIMO channels and provide corresponding code design criteria. As a byproduct, on the conceptual level, we find an interesting relation between the DM tradeoff framework and the notion of dominant error event regions, first introduced in the AWGN case by Gallager, IEEE Trans. IT, 1985. This relation allows us to accurately characterize the error mechanisms in MIMO fading multiple-access channels. In particular, we find that, for a given rate tuple, the maximum achievable diversity order is determined by a single outage event that dominates the total error probability exponentially in SNR. Finally, we show that the distributed space-time code construction proposed recently by Badr and Belfiore, Int. Zurich Seminar on Commun., 2008, satisfies the code design criteria derived in this paper.