BER analysis of TDD downlink multiuser MIMO systems with imperfect channel state information

In downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems, the zero-forcing (ZF) transmission is a simple and effective technique for separating users and data streams of each user at the transmitter side, but its performance depends greatly on the accuracy of the available channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. In time division duplex (TDD) systems, the base station estimates CSI based on uplink pilots and then uses it through channel reciprocity to generate the precoding matrix in the downlink transmission. Because of the constraints of the TDD frame structure and the uplink pilot overhead, there inevitably exists CSI delay and channel estimation error between CSI estimation and downlink transmission channel, which degrades system performance significantly. In this article, by characterizing CSI inaccuracies caused by CSI delay and channel estimation error, we develop a novel bit error rate (BER) expression for M-QAM signal in TDD downlink MU-MIMO systems. We find that channel estimation error causes array gain loss while CSI delay causes diversity gain loss. Moreover, CSI delay causes more performance degradation than channel estimation error at high signal-to-noise ratio for time varying channel. Our research is especially valuable for the design of the adaptive modulation and coding scheme as well as the optimization of MU-MIMO systems. Numerical simulations show accurate agreement with the proposed analytical expressions.