Performance of Multi-antenna Wireless Systems with Channel Estimation Error

Wireless services and applications have become extremely popular and widely employed over the past decades. This, in turn, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of wireless users who demand reliable services with high data rates. But such services are very challenging to provide due to radio channel impairments including multipath fading and co-channel interference. In this regard, the use of multiple antennas in wireless systems was proposed recently which has rapidly received great attention. Multi-antenna technology is shown to have powerful capabilities to improve reliability via spatial diversity and to increase data rates via spatial multiplexing as compared with traditional single-antenna systems. Furthermore, by exploiting additional spatial dimensions, transmit beamforming techniques can be used to manage co-channel interference in such systems. In a rich scattering environment, multiple antennas that are located sufficiently far apart at a transmitter experience independent fading with high probability. Therefore, the transmitter can send redundant versions of the same data stream over these independent channels to improve reliability. In particular, if the transmitter has access to perfect channel state information (CSI), it can set the beamforming weights such that the received signals from different transmit antennas combine constructively at some intended receiver(s) and destructively at some unintended receiver(s) so that no co-channel interference is generated. Spatial multiplexing is another powerful multi-antenna transmission technique which aids in enhancing data rates without increasing bandwidth or transmit power. Multiple parallel and independent channels can be established between a transmitter and a receiver that both use multiple antennas in a rich scattering environment. Therefore, multiple independent streams of data can be simultaneously sent over these channels within the bandwidth of operation. This, in turn, enhances the data rate by a multiplicative factor equal to the number of the independent streams. Water-filling is a strategy that achieves the maximum data rate in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems when perfect CSI is available at both the transmitter and the receiver. In practice, CSI can be obtained at the receiver by the use of training sequences and its accuracy can be increased by carefully selecting sequences with good auto-correlation