Impact of receive correlation on the performance of V-BLAST system

In this paper, we study the error performance of Vertical Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) using maximum likelihood (ML) receiver in the presence of receive correlated fading channel. The squared Euclidean distance is observed to be weighted Chi-square distributed random variable. Based on the observation, we present a new exact expression of the pairwise error probability (PEP) and the union bound of the BER. The asymptotic result is used to quantify the loss of the diversity order and the penalty of SNR. It is shown the loss of diversity order equals to the difference of the number of receiver antennas and the rank of receive correlation matrix, and, in the case of full rank of correlation matrix, the penalty of SNR is determined by the determinant of the receive correlation matrix. Simulation results are given to corroborate the theoretical analysis.