Performance of multiuser diversity in MIMO systems on arbitrary Nakagami-m fading channels

This paper presents unified formulas of the outage probability and the bit error rate (BER) for multiuser diversity with different multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) schemes, including (1) transmit selective/receive selective (SC/SC); (2) transmit selective/receive maximum ratio combining (SC/MRC); and (3) spacetime block codes (STBC) on Nakagami-m fading channels. The exact closed-form expressions can be derived for the outage probability with arbitrary m and for the BER with integer m. For a non-integer fading parameter, the BER is expressible as a single infinite series of Gamma function. We also achieve simplified calculations for the performance at high SNR to gain insights regarding the factors determining the performance in fading. It is shown that the multiuser MIMO systems can achieve a full diversity order. The achieved results provide an analytical framework for the assessment of multiuser MIMO systems. All the analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.