IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO.

3, JUNE 2013 275

Diversity of MMSE Receivers in MIMO Multiple Access Channels
Ahmed Hesham Mehana, Student Member, IEEE, and Aria Nosratinia, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractThis letter analyzes the performance of MMSE re-
ceivers in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) multiple access
channel (MAC). The Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff (DMT) of
the MIMO MAC under MMSE reception easily follows from the
single-user DMT, indicating that MMSE receivers are largely
suboptimal for MIMO MAC. The main result of this letter is the
calculation of the diversity of the MIMO MAC in the xed-
rate regime, i.e., when users transmit at non-zero rates that
are not functions of SNR. In this regime, the MIMO MAC
MMSE receivers exhibit interesting diversity behaviors whose
characterization is completed by the contributions of this letter.
Index TermsMIMO, MMSE, multiple access channel, diver-
sity.
I. INTRODUCTION
L
INEAR receivers are widely used for their low complex-
ity compared with maximum likelihood (ML) receivers.
MMSE receivers are adopted in some of the emerging stan-
dards, e.g. IEEE 802.11n and 802.16e. This work investigates
these receivers in the MIMO multiple access channel (MAC).
This letter starts by extending the Diversity-Multiplexing
Tradeoff (DMT) analysis of MMSE receivers from single-
user to the MAC case, using the invariance of the single-user
results to coding the antenna streams jointly or separately.
We then analyze the MIMO MAC MMSE receivers in the
xed rate regime. Recent developments show [1][3] that a
more delicate analysis is called for in the xed-rate regime
that requires tools and techniques beyond the DMT analysis.
Indeed, a lower bound obtained in [4] showed the MIMO
MAC MMSE can exhibit an intricate behavior. A contribution
of this letter is to calculate an upper bound on diversity that
is tight against the lower bound of [4] and thus establishes the
xed-rate diversity.
A brief review of the relevant literature is as follows. The
known MMSE diversity results, including those mentioned
below, have largely addressed the single-user scenario. The
performance of MMSE receiver in terms of reliability goes
back to [5] where outage analysis was performed for MMSE
SIMO diversity combiner in a Rayleigh fading channel with
multiple interferers. Onggosanusi et al. [6] studied MMSE and
zero-forcing (ZF) MIMO receivers. Hedayat and Nosratinia [1]
considered the outage probability in the xed-rate regime
under joint and separate spatial encoding, but for MMSE
they obtained results only in the extremes of very high and
very low rates. Kumar et al. [2] provided a DMT analysis
for the system of [1] and observed that the the DMT does
not predict the diversity of MMSE receivers at lower rates.
Manuscript received November 27, 2012. The associate editor coordinating
the review of this letter and approving it for publication was K. Wong
The authors are with the the University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX
75083-0688 USA (e-mail: {axm081100, aria}@utdallas.edu).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/WCL.2013.13.120873
Hesham and Nosratinia [3] provide an exact characterization
for the diversity in the xed rate-regime.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
The input-output system model represents a MIMO MAC
with K users, M transmit antennas per user, and N receive
antennas (cf. Figure 1). The MIMO channel in this work
experiences at fading, so that the system model is given by
y =
K

i=1
H
i
x
i
+n = H
e
x +n (1)
where H
i
C
NM
is the channel matrix for User i, with en-
tries that are independent and identically distributed complex
Gaussian. The vector transmitted by User i is x
i
C
M1
.
The transmissions of all users are aggregated into the vec-
tor x = [x
T
1
x
T
2
. . . x
T
K
]
T
, and the corresponding equivalent
channel matrix is H
e
= [H
1
H
2
. . . H
K
]. n C
N1
is the
Gaussian noise vector. The vectors x and n are assumed
independent from each other and from the channel gains. It is
assumed that perfect channel state information is available at
the receiver (CSIR) but not at the transmitter.
We aim to characterize the diversity gain, d(R, M, N),
as a function of the spectral efciency R (bits/sec/Hz) and
the number of transmit and receive antennas. This requires
a pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis which is not
directly tractable. Thankfully outage and PEP exhibit identical
exponential orders in our case, a fact whose proof follows
similarly to [3] and is omitted in this letter for brevity.
Following the notation of [7], we dene the outage-type
quantities
P
out
(R, N, M) P(I(x; y) < R) (2)
d
out
(R, N, M) lim

log P
out
(R, M, N)
log
(3)
where is the per-stream signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
We say that the two functions f() and g() are exponen-
tially equal, denoted by f(p)
.
= g(p) when
lim

log f()
log()
= lim

log g()
log()
The ordering operators

and

are also dened in a similar
manner. If f()
.
=
d
, we say that d is the exponential order
of f(p). The basis of the logarithm is 2 throughout this letter.
III. DMT OF THE MMSE MIMO MAC
Kumar et al. [2] obtained the DMT of MMSE single-user
MIMO receivers:
d(r) = (N M + 1)(1
r
M
)
+
. (4)
2162-2337/13$31.00 c 2013 IEEE
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 0
276 IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO. 3, JUNE 2013
MMSE
User 1
MUX
Base station
H
e

1
User
1

Fig. 1. MIMO system with linear MMSE receiver.

This result shows that MMSE receivers are largely suboptimal
in the DMT sense. This result holds regardless of whether the
antenna data streams are coded independently or jointly, which
allows the result to be trivially extended to a K-user MIMO
MAC system with M-antenna users and MMSE receiver. The
DMT of the MIMO MAC is identical to a single-user MIMO
system with KM transmit antennas, since coding across the
antennas or independently for each antenna does not affect
the DMT. We thus obtain the following lemma, where now
the multiplexing gain r is normalized per-user.
Lemma 1: In a MIMO MAC system with MMSE receiver
consisting of K users, M transmit antennas per user and N
receive antennas, the DMT is given by
d(r) =
_
N KM + 1
_
_
1
r
M
_
+
. (5)
This DMT result does not predict the interesting behavior of
diversity in the xed-rate regime
1
, which is the topic of the
next section.
IV. DIVERSITY IN THE FIXED RATE REGIME
The key result of this letter is as follows:
Theorem 1: In a MIMO MAC system with MMSE receiver
consisting of K users, M transmit antennas per user and N
receive antennas with N KM, the per user diversity is
given by
d(R) =
_
M2
R/M
_
2
+|N KM|
_
M2
R/M
_
(6)
The proof of Theorem 1 is performed via bounding the
outage probability from below and above and then showing
that these two bounds exhibit the same diversity order. It can
then be shown that the pairwise error probability follows the
same diversity as the outage probability, a fact whose proof is
very similar to [3] and is omitted here.
A. MIMO MAC MMSE Outage Upper Bound
The MIMO MAC MMSE outage upper bound was estab-
lished in [4]. We reproduce the outage upper bound here for
completeness, with a slightly different presentation.
1
Please refer to [4] for more discussions about the distinction between the
DMT and the diversity at r = 0.
Without loss of generality we consider the outage probabil-
ity of User 1, considering that the naming and ordering of the
users are arbitrary. The rate transmitted by this user is R.
P
1
out
= P
_
M

k=1
log(1 +
1
k
) < R
_
. (7)
where
1
k
is the unbiased decision-point SINR for the data
stream k of the rst user:

1
k
=
1
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
1, k = 1, M. (8)
where ()
kk
denotes the diagonal element number k. Thus the
outage probability is:
P
1
out
= P
_
M

k=1
log(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
> R
_
. (9)
Using Jensens inequality the outage probability can be
bounded as
P
1
out
P
_
log
_
M

k=1
1
M
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
_
>
R
M
_
P
_
log
_
KM

k=1
1
M
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
_
>
R
M
_
(10)
= P
_
KM

k=1
1
1 +
k
> M2

R
M
_
(11)
where (10) holds by adding positive terms
2
to the argument
of the logarithm, which itself is a monotonically increasing
function. Substituting
k
=
k
, we have the following
exponential equality
1
1 +
k
.
=
_

k1

k
< 1
1
k
> 1.
(12)
Thus at high SNR, each of the additive terms in (11) is either
zero or one, therefore to characterize

k
1
1+k
at high SNR
we basically count the ones. The asymptotic slope of (11) in
the special case of K = 1 was calculated in [3] using the
distribution of {
k
}. This result generalizes to K > 1 in a
straight forward manner, as follows.
P
1
out
P
_
KM

k=1
1
1 +
k
> M2

R
M
_
2
Recall that (I + He
H
He) is a positive denite matrix [8].
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 1
MEHANA and NOSRATINIA: DIVERSITY OF MMSE RECEIVERS IN MIMO MULTIPLE ACCESS CHANNELS 277
.
=
d(R)
(13)
where
d(R) =
_
M2
R/M
_
2
+|N KM|
_
M2
R/M
_
. (14)
B. MIMO MAC MMSE Outage Lower Bound
The lower bound is based on Jensens inequality
P
1
out
= P
_
M

k=1
log
1
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
< R
_
P
_
M log
M

k=1
1
M
1
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
< R
_
(15)
= P
_
M

k=1
1
M
1
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
< 2
R
M
_
(16)
Let the eigen decomposition of H
e
H
H
e
be given by
H
e
H
H
e
= U
H
U where U is unitary and is a diagonal
matrix that has the eigenvalues of the matrix H
e
H
H
e
on its
diagonal. Let the eigenvalues of H
e
H
H
e
be given by {

}
with
1

2

kM
. Let the vector u
k
be the column k
of the matrix U, we have
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
= u
H
k
(I + )
1
u
k
=
KM

=1
|u
k
|
2
1 +

S
k
.
Let

k = arg min
k
S
k
. we can bound the sum in (15)
1
M
M

k=1
1
(I + H
e
H
H
e
)
1
kk
=
1
M
M

k=1
1
S
k

1
min
k
S
k
=
1
S
k
(17)
thus the outage bound in (15) can be further bounded
P
out
P
_
S
k
> 2

R
M
_
(18)
We now bound (18) by conditioning on the event
B
_
|u

k
|
2

a
M
, = KM M + 1, , KM
_
(19)
where a is a positive real number that is slightly smaller
than one a = 1
1
, and
1
is a small positive number. We
then have
P
out
P
_
S
k
> 2

R
M
_
P
_
S
k
> 2

R
M

B
_
P(B)
= P
_
KM

=1
|u

k
|
2
1 +

> 2

R
M

B
_
P(B)
P
_
KM

=KMM+1
|u

k
|
2
1 +

> 2

R
M

B
_
P(B) (20)
P
_
1
M
KM

=KMM+1
a
1 +

> 2

R
M
_
P(B)
.
= P
_
1
M
KM

=KMM+1
a
1 +

> 2

R
M
_
(21)
= P
_
KM

=KMM+1
1
1 +

>
M
a
2

R
M
_
(22)
where (20) follows by removing some of the elements of the
sum corresponding to the largest eigenvalues. Eq. (21) follows
because P(B) is nite and independent of . The proof is
similar to [2, Appendix A]
Note that H
e
H
H
e
is not a Wishart matrix, hence the
analysis of Section IV.A does not directly apply here. The
block diagonal elements of H
e
H
H
e
are similar and are given
by
D =

i=0
H
H
i
H
i
. (23)
The matrix H
e
H
H
e
is Toeplitz and Hermitian. Moreover,
the matrix D given by (23) is a Wishart matrix
3
.
Observe that the probability in (22) depends on the M
smallest eigenvalues. We now bound these eigenvalues with
the eigenvalues of the matrix D via the Sturmian separation
theorem [9, P.1077].
Theorem 2: (Sturmian Separation Theorem) Let {A
r
, r =
1, 2, . . .} be a sequence of symmetric r r matrices such that
each A
r
is a submatrix of A
r+1
. Then if {
k
(A
r
) , k =
1, . . . , r} denote the ordered eigenvalues of each matrix A
r
in descending order, we have

k+1
(A
i+1
)
k
(A
i
)
k
(A
i+1
).
For our purposes, we consider a special case of the
Sturmian Theorem by constructing a set of matrices
A
M
, A
M+1
, . . . , A
LdM
starting by the largest one A
LdM

=
H
e
H
H
e
and making all other matrices A
i
to be (successively
embedded) i i principal submatrices of H
e
H
H
e
, such that
the smallest matrix is A
M
= D
Ld
. Then we repeatedly apply
the rst inequality in the Sturmian to get:
ML
d
(AML
d
) ML
d
1(AML
d
1) M(AM)
ML
d
1(AML
d
) ML
d
2(AML
d
1) M1(AM)
.
.
.
.
.
.
ML
d
M+1(AML
d
) ML
d
M(AML
d
1) 1(AM)
This implies that the smallest M eigenvalues of H
e
H
H
e
are bounded above by the M eigenvalues of D, respectively.
Hence:
P
out

P
_
M

k=1
1
1 +
k
(D)
>
M
a
2

R
M
_
. (24)
3
Let W(n,

) denote a Wishart distribution with degree of freedom

n and covariance (also called scale) matrix

. Any of the diagonal block

matrices Dj given by (23) follows a Wishart distribution since if B1
W(n1,

) and B2 W(n2,

) then B1 +B2 W(n1 + n2,

).
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 2
278 IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO. 3, JUNE 2013
D is a sum of ( + 1) central Wishart matrices each with N
degrees of freedom and with identity covariance matrix, i.e.
D W(KN, I). Therefore analysis similar to the analysis
of [4, Section III-B] applies here and we get
P
_
M

k=1
1
1 +
k
(D)
>
M
a
2

R
M
_
.
=
d(R)
. (25)
Remark 1: Using the linear MMSE receiver, the diversity
of each user depends on the rate transmitted by that user, but
is independent of the rate of other users. This is due to the
fact that the residual interference is considered as noise.
Remark 2: For simplicity the results of this letter were
developed under the assumption that all users experience the
same transmit-side equivalent SNR of , however, it is straight
forward to show that the result applies to unequal SNR as long
as
i

j
= O(1).
Remark 3: The results of this letter can easily be general-
ized to remove the restriction N KM. The main difference
is that some eigenvalues of H
e
H
H
e
are zero when N < KM.
The generalized result is:
d(R) =
__
M2
R/M
(KM N)
+
_
+
_
2
+ |N KM|
__
M2
R/M
(KM N)
+
_
+
_
(26)
V. CONCLUSION
In this letter the diversity of the MMSE MIMO receiver in
multiple access channel is calculated. The diversity in the xed
rate-regime (where the spectral efciency R is not a function
of SNR) is fully characterized.
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 3