IEEE - 31661

Review : Performance Evolution of different

Detection Techniques in V-BLAST
Pratik P Jariwala(1)
(1)

Pranav Lapsiwala(2)

Department of Electronics & Communication, Sarvajanik

College of Engineering & Technology, Surat,
Gujarat, India 395001
pratik_1485@yahoo.com

(2)

Department of Electronics & Communication,

Sarvajanik College of Engineering & Technology,
Surat, Gujarat, India 395001
pranav.lapsiwala@scet.ac.in

Abstract Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) channels

can offer high capacity to wireless systems and the capacity
increases linearly with the number of antennas. There are many
schemes that can be applied to MIMO systems such as space time
block codes, space time trellis codes, and the Vertical Bell Labs
Space-Time Architecture (V-BLAST). We study the general
MIMO system, the general V-BLAST structure with ZeroForcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Estimation (MMSE)
detectors. Based on bit error rate, we show the performance of
these receiver schemes in flat fading channels in MatLab.
Keywords Rayleigh fading channel, BER, SNR, Multiple
Input Multiple Output (MIMO), Minimum Mean Square Error
(MMSE) and Zero Forcing (ZF)

I.
INTRODUCTION
Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless systems
have recently emerged as one of the most significant
techniques to improve the performances of wireless
communication. Among the recent developments to relieve the
bottleneck of wireless data transmission, MIMO techniques
show tremendous potential.[1] MIMO offers an increase in
traffic capacity for future cellular systems, to face the
challenge of internet-intensive applications.
In recent years, significant amount of research activity has
focused on the use of multiple-element arrays (MEAs) at both
the transmitter and the receiver of a communication system to
achieve high data rate. Such multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) systems have been shown to have capacity increasing
linearly with the minimum of the number of transmit and
receive antennas under power and bandwidth constraints.[2]
II. INTRODUCTION OF MIMO
An illustration of the MIMO channel can be seen in Figure
2.1. The MIMO system has Nt transmitting antennas and Nr
receiving antennas.
In order to describe the MIMO channel, investigation of
the channel model is done at a certain time m. x[m] = [x 1. . .
xNt]T denotes the transmit symbols of order Nt 1, and the
received symbols of order Nr 1 vector is
y[m] = H x[m] + w[m]

(1)

in (1), w[m] = [w1 . . . wNr]T represents white Gaussian

noise, with variance of 2 .

Fig. 1. Illustration of MIMO channel [3]

The channel matrix H is
=

11

(2)

Here represent the channel coefficient from transmitting

antenna j to the receiving antenna i.
Large number of Scatters in channels is the key point of
discussion. The Rayleigh fading model depicts the scenario
when signal is scattered by environmental objects before it
arrives at receiver. There are different methods that can be
used to deal with the problem caused by fading.
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have
attracted considerable research attention and it is considered as
one of the most significant technical breakthroughs in wireless
communications. Explicitly, MIMO schemes can be
categorized as diversity techniques, multiplexing schemes,
multiple access methods, and beamforming as well as
multifunctional MIMO arrangements. [8]
Diversity techniques: Diversity is the technique where the
receiver receives several replicas of the same transmitted
signal, while assuming that at least some of them are not
severely attenuated.
Multiplexing techniques: Multiplexing techniques were
designed in order to improve the attainable spectral efficiency
of the system by transmitting the signals independent of each
of the transmit antennas.

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IEEE - 31661

Multiple access techniques: In the context of diversity and

multiplexing techniques, the antennas are spaced as far apart
as possible so that the signals transmitted to or received by the
different antennas experience independent fading, and hence
we attain the highest possible diversity or multiplexing gain.
Beamforming techniques: Improvement in signal to noise
ratio at the receiver can be achieved by employing
beamforming techniques, where the antenna gain is increased
in the direction of the desired user, while reducing the gain
towards the interfering users.
Multifunctional MIMOs: As the name suggests,
multifunctional MIMOs combine the benefits of several
MIMO schemes including diversity gains, multiplexing gains,
and beamforming gains.
MIMO systems use any of above mentioned methods to
combat fading, and have the advantage of introducing
diversity gain at both sides of the link, each of them with an
antenna array. A general system with multiple transmitting
and receiving antennas is shown in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3.
Tx 1

Encoder

Interleaver

S/P
convertor

V-BLAST is a single user scheme which has multiple

transmitters. It divides the data stream into sub-streams and
transmits them through multiple transmitters at the same time
and frequency. This results in receiving the data at the receiver
at the same time and frequency. By implementing V-BLAST
algorithm, the diversity gain is increased and the bit error rate
(BER) performance is improved. [4]
On the other hand, in a slow fading channel, the outage
optimization can be achieved if the transmitter is aware of the
characteristics of the channel matrix H. However, in MIMO
system, the transmitter has no access to the channel realization.
Since in a slow fading channel, if the channel gains from the kth
transmitting antenna to all the Nr receiving antennas are in a
deep fade, then the data in the kth stream will be lost.
V-BLAST Transmitter
In a V-BLAST system, all the symbols are transmitted by
different transmitting antennas and independent from each
other. The coded bits from the same codeword are transmitted
by the same transmitter, which also means they will go
through the same channel vector.

Tx 2

III. V-BLAST
In previous section, a general multiple antennas system is
introduced, with its transmitter and receiver. However, the
system complexity increases when coding is introduced across
the antennas. Thus the V-BLAST architecture is needed,
which uses independent coding and decoding, to simplify the
communication system.

Modulator

V-BLAST Receiver
Tx Nt
Fig. 2. Transmitter of a general MIMO system

At transmitter side, Data is first encoded and interleaved.

Then a block of Nt symbols is converted from serial to
parallel, modulated and then each symbol is fed to one of the
Nt antennas. Thus, the block of Nt symbols is transmitted
At receiver side, first the received vector is sent to a
demodulator. Then a block of Nt demodulated symbols is
converted from parallel to serial, deinterleavered and decoded.
Thus the data transmitted by Nt transmitting antennas are
recovered at the receiver.
Rx 1
Rx 2
Demodulator

P/S
Deinterleaver
convertor

Decoder

Rx Nr
Fig. 3. Receiver of a general MIMO system

As the streams are independently encoded, separation of

the Nt transmitted streams are needed after demodulation and
then decode them separately with their own decoders. The
complexity grows exponentially with the number of data
streams. As a result, simpler detecting rule that provides soft
information to feed to the decoders of the individual data
streams is an active area of research. Modification at the
receiver architecture is done in Fig. 3, so that linear operations
can be used to convert the problem of joint detection into
individual detection. In conjunction with successive
cancellation of data streams, the capacity of a fast fading
MIMO channel can be achieved.
The Vertical Bell labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST)
system suggested in [7] is one of the MIMO transceivers
systems designed to achieve good multiplexing gain. In the VBLAST transmitter, every antenna transmits its own
independently coded symbol. The V-BLAST receiver is a
spatial-domain decision feedback equalizer (DFE) as shown in
Fig. 4[6]. In this scheme, one by one, the symbols are
decoded. Then, the decoded symbol is fed back to cancel its
interference with other symbols. This process repeats until all
of the symbols are decoded. The decoding order can be
optimized by decoding the symbol with the largest signal-tonoise ratio (SNR) first to reduce the error propagation. Due to
this decision feedback structure, the V-BLAST system has
very good spectral efficiency in a scattering rich environment
[7].

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IEEE - 31661

Initialization :
1

(7)

1 = +

(8)

1 = argmin 1

(9)

Recursion :

(10)

= T

(11)

(12)

Fig. 4. V-BLAST scheme [6]

IV.

+1 =

DETECTION METHOD AT RECEIVER

+1 =

In this section, two methods are proposed for detecting the

received symbols in MIMO system with Rayleigh fading
channel. The first method is Zero Forcing (ZF) detection
method and the second is Minimum Mean Square
Error(MMSE) detection method.
A.

Zero Forcing detection

In wireless communication, due to Doppler Effect, the

time is varying. In this case as the channel is not constant for
two consecutive symbols, following two methods are used for
Alamouti Transmit diversity.

+1 = argmin
1

(3)

Here, y is received signal and n is noise.

To solve for x, to find a matrix W which satisfies WH=I.
The Zero Forcing (ZF) linear detector for meeting this
constraint is given by
=
B.

(4)

MMSE linear detection

Similar to the ZF detector, the Minimum Mean Square

Error (MMSE) approach tries to find a coefficient W for the
equation of y which minimizes the criterion [5].
Find the matrix W to have
min

where W is Nr Nt matrix.
The solution is shown to be given by
= + 1

= +

+1

(15)
(16)

Where G, w are the weight vector, r is the received vector

before estimation, H+ is the pseudo inverse of the channel
matrix, Q is the decision process and i is the increment index.
Equation (13) performs cancellation of the detected component
from the received vector, and (14) computes the new pseudo
inverse for the next iteration.
V.

SIMULATION AND RESULTS

Simulations and results on the bit error rate (BER) are

discussed in this chapter. In this section we compare the biterror probability performance for the different detectors
proposed in chapter 3 using MATLAB software.
In this simulation, the fading channel characteristics are
assumed to be known perfectly at the receiver. Detailed
Simulation parameters are listed below in Table 1
Number of Transmitter

Number of Receiver

Modulation

BPSK, 8-QAM, 8-PSK

Number of Blocks

50000

Noise

White Noise

Channel

Rayleigh

Frequency

2.5 GHz

Bandwidth

20-25 MHz

Software

MATLAB R2009a

(6)

In above equation, I is Nr Nt identity matrix and is the

signal-to-noise ratio of each data stream.
C.

(14)

+1

At receiver the received signal is

y[m] = H x[m] + w[m]

(13)

V-BLAST detection algorithm[7]

The full ZF V-BLAST detection algorithm can now be

described compactly as a recursive procedure, including
determination of the optimal ordering, as follows:

Table 1. Simulation Parameters

The performance of the ZF detector and MMSE detector

for different modulations are shown in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6
respectively for 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) systems. There is
very little degradation due to the time-varying channel.

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IEEE - 31661
BER for Different modulation with 2x2 MIMO(V-BLAST)
and ZF equalizer (Rayleigh channel)
BPSK sim
8-QAM sim
8-PSK sim

-1

10

Modulation

-2

Bit Error Rate

10

SNR
20

25

30

35

BPSK

0.001208

0.000423

0.000128

4.6e-05

8-QAM

0.005457

0.001814

0.000563

0.000186

8-PSK

0.027459

0.009065

0.002876

0.00095

-3

10

Table 3. BER values for different modulation at different

-4

SNR of MMSE/V-BLAST

10

-5

10

10

20
15
Average Eb/No,dB

35

30

25

Performance comparison between ZF/V-BLAST and

MMSE/V-BLAST for BPSK, 8-QAM and 8-PSK modulation
is shown in Fig. 7, Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 respectively.

Fig. 5. BER for different modulation with 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) and

ZF equalizer for Rayleigh channel

BER for BPSK modulation of 2x2 MIMO(V-BLAST)

with ZF and MMSE equalizer (Rayleigh channel)

BER for Different modulation with 2x2 MIMO

and MMSE equalizer (Rayleigh channel)
BPSK sim
8-QAM sim
8-PSK sim

10

-2

10
Bit Error Rate

-1

-2

10

Bit Error Rate

sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, ZF)

sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, MMSE)

-1

10

-3

10

-4

10

-3

10

-5

10

-4

10

-5

10

10

15
20
Average Eb/No,dB

25

30

35

Modulation

20

25

30

35

BPSK

0.002516

0.000814

0.000238

8.2e-05

8-QAM

0.01243

0.003956

0.001278

0.000438

8-PSK

0.032138

0.010607

0.003329

0.001064

Table 2. BER values for different modulation at different

25

30

35

BER for 8-QAM modulation of 2x2 MIMO(V-BLAST)

with ZF and MMSE equalizer (Rayleigh channel)
sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, ZF)
sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, MMSE)

-1

10

-2

10
Bit Error Rate

SNR

15
20
Average Eb/No,dB

Fig. 7. BER for BPSK modulation with 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) and

ZF\MMSE equalizer for Rayleigh channel

Fig. 6. BER for different modulation with 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) and

MMSE equalizer for Rayleigh channel

From above Fig. 5 and Fig. 6, BPSK modulation performs

2-3 dB better than 8-QAM and 8-PSK modulation scheme for
ZF/V-BLAST and MMSE/V-BLAST. The BER values at
different SNR of different modulation schemes for ZF/VBLAST and MMSE/V-BLAST are shown in following Table2 and Table-3.

10

-3

10

-4

10

-5

10

10

15
20
Average Eb/No,dB

25

30

35

Fig. 8. BER for 8-QAM modulation with 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) and

ZF\MMSE equalizer for Rayleigh channel

SNR of ZF/V-BLAST

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IEEE - 31661

MMSE detections, BPSK modulation has 2-5 dB better SNR

than 8-QAM and 8-PSK at any desirable BER value. Again, for
different modulation techniques such as BPSK, 8-QAM and 8PSK, MMSE detection technique performs 1-5 dB SNR
improved than ZF detection.

BER for PSK-8 modulation of 2x2 MIMO(V-BLAST)

with ZF and MMSE equalizer (Rayleigh channel)
sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, ZF)
sim (nTx=2, nRx=2, MMSE)

-1

10

-2

VII. REFERENCES

Bit Error Rate

10

[1]

-3

10

[2]

-4

10

[3]
-5

10

10

20
15
Average Eb/No,dB

25

30

35

Fig. 9. BER for 8-PSK modulation with 2 2 MIMO (V-BLAST) and

ZF\MMSE equalizer for Rayleigh channel

[4]

[5]

VI. CONCLUSION
This work introduces a general multiple antenna system
and V-BLAST detector systems with ZF and MMSE detection.
The performance of these MIMO schemes in flat fading
channel is analyzed with the help of MATLAB tool. The
general multiple antenna system and the V-BLAST system are
analyzed with Zero Forcing (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square
Error (MMSE) detection. It is observed from simulation results
that as the value of SNR increases, BER value of any detection
techniques is becoming less. That means that performance of
any detection technique is improved at higher SNR. For ZF and

[6]

[7]

[8]

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