On Achievable Rates of MIMO Systems with Nonlinear Receivers

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems are popular for achieving high rates, but at the same time they suffer from high implementation cost. Hence, their adoption to future distributed systems, e.g., sensor networks, is stalled due to the stringent cost and power constraints of the node design. One solution is the combination of MIMO systems with nonlinear detectors, i.e., amplitude or phase detectors, which are known for their cheap implementation cost and low power consumption. We provide semi-analytical results for achievable rates in MIMO systems that use nonlinear detectors for the fast fading channel, as well as outage probabilities for the same detectors in the slow fading case.