Error probability analysis of a novel adaptive beamforming receiver for large-scale multiple-input-multiple-output communication system

A novel adaptive beamforming (BF) receiver is proposed for a multiple-input-multiple-output communication system over multipath fading channels. By dividing a large number of receive antennas into many adaptive beamformers (ABFs), the proposed system reduces the array dimension in order to simplify the signal detection process and enjoys the benefit of BF techniques to improve the symbol-error-rate (SER) performance. The effectiveness of the proposed system depends on the number of ABFs and the number of antennas per ABF. The statistical properties of complex Wishart matrices are applied to analyse the SER performance of the proposed system with both maximum-likelihood (ML) detection and zero-forcing detection. Furthermore, the authors have derived an upper bound for SER of the ML detection based on the smallest eigenvalue distribution. Through the authors analysis, it has been shown that the proposed system using ML detection provides comparable SER performance, but with a lower complexity as compared with that of a conventional ML receiver because of reduced array dimensions.