On the Design of Minimum BER Linear MIMO Transceivers with Perfect or Partial Channel State Information

Linear MIMO transceivers (composed of a linear precoder at the transmitter and a linear equalizer at the receiver) are a low-complexity approach to optimize the spectral efficiency and/or the reliability of the communication, when channel state information is available at both sides of the link. In this paper we focus on the minimum BER linear transceiver design. Based on the observation that the common practice of fixing a priori the number of transmitted data symbols per channel use inherently limits the diversity gain of the system, we derive a minimum BER linear precoding scheme that achieves the full diversity of the MIMO channel. Finally, we adapt the proposed design to the limited feedback case, i.e. when the optimum transmit matrix is selected from a codebook at the receiver. Numerical simulations show that both schemes outperform the classical minimum BER designs exiting in the literature.