Closed-Form Expressions of the V-BLAST Performance over Quadrature-Amplitude Modulation

In this paper we derive the symbol error rate (SER) of the vertical Bell laboratories layered space-time (V-BLAST) detection algorithm based on zero-forcing successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) over an independent and identically distributed Rayleigh flat fading channel. By introducing the concepts of "event" and "state" related to error propagation, we evaluate the effect of error propagation and calculate the exact SER of each layer in a simple way. Compared with the pre-existing results, our approach can offer the closed-form expression of the SER of arbitrary quadrature-amplitude modulation (QAM) for an arbitrary number of transmit and receiver antennas. Furthermore, our analysis matches very well with Monte Carlo simulation results.