MIMO multichannel beamforming: SER and outage using new eigenvalue distributions of complex noncentral Wishart matrices

This paper analyzes MIMO systems with multichannel beamforming in Ricean fading. Our results apply to a wide class of multichannel systems which transmit on the eigenmodes of the MIMO channel. We first present new closed-form expressions for the marginal ordered eigenvalue distributions of complex noncentral Wishart matrices. These are used to characterize the statistics of the signal to noise ratio (SNR) on each eigenmode. Based on this, we present exact symbol error rate (SER) expressions. We also derive closed-form expressions for the diversity order, array gain, and outage probability. We show that the global SER performance is dominated by the subchannel corresponding to the minimum channel singular value. We also show that, at low outage levels, the outage probability varies inversely with the Ricean A*-factor for cases where transmission is only on the most dominant subchannel (i.e. a singlechannel beamforming system). Numerical results are presented to validate the theoretical analysis.