Applying Nakagami Distribution for BER Analysis of Equal Gain Transmission in MU-MIMO Systems

Abstract In this paper, the bit-error rate (BER) performance of equal gain transmission (EGT) has been analyzed in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. The multiuser interference (MUI), conditioned by the EGT precoding, is found highly correlated with the desired signal when the number of transmit antennas M is in moderate-scale ( M ⩽ 64 ). For such case, the common independent Gaussian assumption for MUI loses precision. In this paper, a translated Nakagami approximation is proposed to characterize the equivalent channel effect, including the channel fading of the desired user and the correlated MUI. The resulted analytical BER equation shows a satisfactory accuracy for both moderate-scale and large-scale MU-MIMO systems.