Performance of a MIMO receiver using joint channel-symbol estimation in the presence of channel errors

In this paper, the performance of a MIMO receiver which uses joint channel-symbol estimation is analyzed. The analysis accounts for situations where no channel information is available at the receiver, as well as for situations where an imperfect channel estimate is available. The former case corresponds to blind MIMO. For the latter case, channel estimation errors due to noise and due to time variations induced by Doppler are considered. A closed form solution is derived for the block pairwise error probability at high SNR. The result involves taking the expectation of the Q-function which is evaluated using Guass-Chebychev quadrature numerical integration rule. Based on the obtained pairwise error probability, the total bit error rate of the system is tightly upper bounded at high SNR. The accuracy of the analysis is verified by Monte Carlo simulations.