1188 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 61, NO.

3, MARCH 2013
A New BER Upper Bound for
Multiuser Downlink Systems
Dianjun Chen and Takeshi Hashimoto, Member, IEEE
AbstractWe consider improvement of bit error rate (BER)
upper bounds, based on the notion of decomposable error vectors
(DEVs) introduced by S. Verd u, for downlink multiuser space-
time systems over Rayleigh fading channels. Although omission of
DEVs and limiting before averaging (LBA) technique are known
to improve the standard union bound (UB) considerably, it is
mathematically intractable to obtain a bound in a closed-form.
In this paper, assuming maximum-likelihood (ML) detection
for downlink multiuser space-time spreading (STS) systems, we
introduce a new modication of the decomposability of error
vectors and propose a new BER upper bound. We prove that
the proposed bound is tighter than the standard union bound and
the bound based on the overall decomposability. The numerical
results show that the proposed bound is also tighter than
the bound based on positive-sum-decomposability (PSD) in the
scenario of downlink multiuser transmission.
Index TermsBER upper bound, maximum-likelihood decod-
ing, improved union bound, MIMO fading channel, indecompos-
able error vector, space-time spreading (STS), CDMA.
I. INTRODUCTION
P
ERFORMANCE analysis of maximum likelihood (ML)
detection has fundamental importance in designing a
transmission system over channels with interference and fad-
ing. Calculating the bit error rate (BER) of a non-orthogonal
system over fading channels is difcult in general and the
union bound (UB), the sum of all the pairwise error probabil-
ities (PEPs), is a standard tool for performance analysis [1].
When the system is operative in a severe fading environment,
the UB becomes loose and sometimes is not even convergent
at low signal-to-noise power ratios (SNRs). Thus, there have
been many efforts to tighten the UB [2]-[16].
The progressive union bound (PUB) in [2] is an enhance-
ment of the UB, where each candidate error vector is compared
with multiple adversary error vectors contrary to the UB
where each candidate error vector is compared with the single
adversary vector, the correct vector. Although the enhancement
gives an improved bound, each term in the bound includes a
multiple integral and hence a closed form expression for the
bound is difcult to obtain. In [3], an approximate expression
for the PUB is obtained rst by replacing each multiple
Manuscript received December 30, 2011; revised August 4, 2012. The
associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for
publication was G. Bauch.
Some materials of this paper were presented at IEICE Conference on
Information Theory, Nagoya, March 2006, and PIMRC 2009, Tokyo, Sept.
2009.
D. Chen is with Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (e-
mail: dianjun chen@yahoo.cn).
T. Hashimoto is with The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo
(e-mail: hasimoto@itl.ee.uec.ac.jp).
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TCOMM.2013.012313.110850
integral with a saddle point (SP) approximation and then by
truncating the Taylor series expansion of the SP approximation
at the second order term. However, the resulting expression is
only an approximation of the PUB and may not even be an
upper bound. In [4], from the observation that any probability
never exceeds one, a technique called limiting before averag-
ing (LBA) is proposed, where the sum of conditional PEPs,
conditional on the channel state information (CSI), is replaced
with one whenever the sum exceeds one in the averaging
process with respect to CSI. The technique improves the UB
at low SNRs, but it does not allow analytical expressions
and, moreover, time-consuming averaging is required. As an
effort to obtain bounds with explicit expressions, in [5]-
[7], the Gallager bound that was originally used for upper
bounding a key thresholding function in information theory[8]
is employed to obtain bounds which are looser but more
manageable than the LBA bound. A specialized form of the
Gallager bound is also proposed in [9] and is applied to coded
systems in [9] and [10]. An alternative approach is to explicitly
expurgate unnecessary terms from the union bound.
The notion of indecomposable error vectors (IEVs) was
introduced by S. Verd u to reshape the union bound for
the multiuser detection (MUD) problem over the AWGN
channel [11]. The heart of the idea is that error vectors
satisfying certain conditions are decomposable to error vectors
of smaller weights and that only those error vectors that
are indecomposable in this sense are sufcient for upper
bound. The notion has been specialized to fading channels and
applied to performance evaluation for code-division multiple
access (CDMA) [12][13], for bit-interleaved coded modulation
(BICM) [14], and for space-time coding [3][15][16]. In most
of these proposals, that is, in [3], [12], and [14]-[16], an
error vector is considered to be removable only when it is
decomposable for all the CSI, the overall decomposability,
and hence the improvement over the UB is limited. Mohasseb
et al. [13], on the other hand, proposed a new modication to
the decomposability, called the positive-sum decomposability
(PSD), and derived a new BER upper bound for the CDMA
uplink channel. The new denition reects the CSI on the
decomposability of the respective error vectors and yet is
simple enough to allow numerical evaluation.
In this paper, for a downlink multiple input-multiple output
(MIMO) system over a at fading channel, we propose a
new upper bound on the BER of ML detection based on
a new sufcient condition for the decomposability of error
vectors. To this end, we revisit the upper bound based on
Verd us decomposability [11] and the LBA argument [4].
These two bounds are actually difcult to evaluate for fading
0090-6778/13$31.00 c 2013 IEEE
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 0
CHEN and HASHIMOTO: A NEW BER UPPER BOUND FOR MULTIUSER DOWNLINK SYSTEMS 1189
channels and we can only recourse to Monte-Carlo method to
evaluate them. We then proceed to propose a simple method
to reduce the difculty in incorporating the decomposability
into the BER upper bound. The new upper bound is tighter
than the bound based on the overall decomposability [12][14]-
[16] as well as the bound based on the PSD [13] specialized
to downlink channel. We give some numerical results to
compare the proposed bound and other bounds, some of which
are evaluated numerically and the rest are evaluated through
Monte-Carlo simulation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The system
model and maximum likelihood detector are described in
Section II. Upper bounds of bit error probability conditioned
on given path coefcients are discussed in Section III. The pro-
posed average BER upper bound is explained in Section IV.
Some numerical results are shown in Section V. A conclusion
is given in the last section.
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
We consider a single-cell synchronous downlink MIMO
CDMA system based on space-time spreading (STS). The
base station transmits signals with L antennas and each of
K users (mobile terminals) receives the CDMA signals with
M antennas. A signature waveform s
(l)
k
(t) of length T is used
for the transmission of the information bit of user k from the
lth antenna and is given as
s
(l)
k
(t) =
N1

n=0
s
(l)
k,n
(t nT
c
),
where T
c
= T/N is the chip length, (t) is a chip waveform
which is conned in [0, T
c
] and normalized as
_
Tc
0

2
(t)dt =
1, and s
(l)
k
= [s
(l)
k,0
, s
(l)
k,1
, , s
(l)
k,N1
]
T
is the associated
signature sequence of length N, the processing gain of the
system. The signature sequences are normalized as
L

l=1
N1

n=0
[s
(l)
k,n
[
2
= 1, k = 1, , K. (1)
We assume BPSK modulation. The information bit b
k

1, 1 of user k is multiplied with s
(l)
k
(t), = 1, , L,
and transmitted from the respective antennas synchronously
with signals from other users. Throughout this paper, user 1
is the desired user and only the receiver of the desired user is
considered.
We assume that each pair of one transmit antenna, say the
lth transmitting antenna, of the base station and one receive
antenna, say the mth antenna, of the desired user constitutes
a frequency at quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel with
channel coefcient
l,m
. The channel coefcients are mutually
independent, circularly symmetric complex Gaussian random
variables with mean zero and variance 1/2 per dimension
and are xed during a bit interval. We also assume that the
receiver completely knows the channel state information (CSI)

l,m
, l = 1, 2, , L and m = 1, , M, but the transmitter
(base station) does not.
The signal received by the mth antenna is
r
m
(t) =
K

k=1
L

l=1
A
k

M
b
k

l,m
s
(l)
k
(t) +w
m
(t),
where A
k
is the amplitude assigned to user k and w
m
(t)
is a zero-mean white Gaussian noise (WGN) with one-sided
power spectral density per dimension N
0
. We assume that
the noise signals received by different antennas are mutually
independent. For the information vector b = [b
1
, , b
K
]
T
,
the received signal is expressed as
r
m
(t) =
1

T
(t)SZ
m
Ab +w
m
(t),
where the superscript T denotes transpose and we let
(t) =
_
(t), , (t (N 1)T
c
)

T
S =
_
S
1
, , S
K

NKL
S
k
=
_
s
(1)
k
, , s
(L)
k
_
NL
Z
m
= diag
_

m
, ,
m
_
KLK

m
=
_

1,m
, ,
L,m

T
A = diag
_
A
1
, , A
K
_
KK
.
In the above expressions, diag(a
1
, a
2
, , a

) denotes an
diagonal matrix with the specied diagonal elements if
a
i
are scalars and denotes an block diagonal matrix if
a
i
are vectors or matrices. The cross-correlation matrix of all
the spreading sequences is given by
R = S
H
S =
_

_
R
11
, , R
1K
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
R
K1
, , R
KK
_

_
KLKL
with LL matrices R
kk
= S
H
k
S
k
where the superscript H
denotes conjugate transpose.
According to the previous assumption, moreover, the chan-
nel coefcient vector
m
consisting of L independent circu-
larly symmetric random variables
,m
with variance one has
a probability density function (pdf) [17]
p(
m
) =
L
exp
_
|
m
|
2
_
. (2)
With ML multiuser detection (MUD) under perfect CSI,
we select an information vector

b that maximizes the log-
likelihood function (b) given by
(b) =
M

m=1
_
2

M
1
_
(Z
m
Ab)
H
y
m

1
M
(Z
m
Ab)
H
RZ
m
Ab
_
. (3)
In this expression y
m
= [y
T
m,1
, , y
T
m,K
]
T
with y
m,k
=
[y
(1)
m,k
, , y
(L)
m,k
]
T
is the output of the series of the chip-
matched lter and code-matched lter bank located at the
output of the mth receive antenna and is given by
y
m
=
1

M
RZ
m
Ab +n
m
, (4)
where n
m
=
_
T
0
S
H
(t)w
m
(t)dt.
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 1
1190 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 61, NO. 3, MARCH 2013
III. CONDITIONAL BER UPPER BOUNDS
A. Conditional union bounds
Given information vectors b and b

, the normalized differ-

ence e = [e
1
, e
2
, , e
K
]
T
= (b b

)/2 is called an error

vector [18]. The set of error vectors which affect user k is E
k
=
_
e 1, 0, 1
K
; e
k
,= 0
_
and the set of all error vectors
is E =

K
k=1
E
k
. For each e E, let W(e) =

K
k=1
[e
k
[.
The set of admissible error vectors (for the desired user)
under the condition that b is transmitted is given by /
1
(b)
= e E
1
; e = (b b

)/2 for some b

. Given CSI =

1
, ,
M
, the conditional error probability is
1
P
e,1
() = Pr[(b2e) (b) for an e /
1
(b)[].
Since transmitted bits are equiprobable, the probability that a
given e is admissible is Pr [e /
1
(b)] = 2
W(e)
. We can
see that the event (b 2e) (b) is independent of the
transmitted b since (3) and (4) show that the left-hand side
does not include b as
(b 2e) (b) =
M

m=1
_
4

M
1
_
(Z
m
Ae)
H
n
m

4
M
(Z
m
Ae)
H
R(Z
m
Ae)
_
. (5)
Thus, we have a conditional union bound (UB) for the given

P
e,1
()

eE1
2
W(e)
Pr[(b2e) (b)[]. (6)
Applying the LBA argument [4], we also have the conditional
LBA union bound (LBA-UB)
P
e,1
()min
_
1,

eE1
2
W(e)
Pr[ (b2e)(b)[]
_
. (7)
B. Upper bounds based on decomposability
It is shown in [11] (also see [18]) that some error vectors
can be omitted from the summation in (6).
We say that a pair of error vectors, e

, e

, is an E
1
-
partition of e if
1) e = e

+e

2) e

E
1
and e

E
3) e

i
= e

i
= 0 whenever e
i
= 0, i = 1, , K
and introduce the set D
1
(e) of all the E
1
-partitions of e. For
our system, the denition of decomposable error vectors is
stated as follows[11][18].
Denition 1: Given , an error vector e E
1
is said
decomposable to e

, e

D
1
(e) or, simply, decomposable
if the E
1
-partition of e satises (e

, e

) 0, where
(e

, e

) =
1
M
M

m=1

H
m
G(e

, e

)
m
G(e

, e

) =
K

i=1
K

j=1
A
i
A
j
e

i
e

j
(R
ij
+R
ji
).
1
The equality holds under the assumption that the tie (b 2e) = (b)
always leads to an error.
The e is said indecomposable if there is no such E
1
-partitions.
It is not difcult to see that, if we let
S(e) =
1
M
M

m=1
(Z
m
Ae)
H
R(Z
m
Ae),
then the condition (e

, e

) 0 is equivalent to S(e)
S(e

) + S(e

). As discussed in [20], the decomposability

of e is intimately connected to the minimality of S(e) as a
quadratic form of
m
given by
S(e) =
1
M
M

m=1

H
m
H(e)
m
, (8)
where we let
H(e) =
K

k=1
K

=1
A
k
e
k
A
k
e
k
R
kk
. (9)
Let F

1
= e E
1
: (e

, e

) < 0 for all e

, e

D
1
(e)
be the set of all indecomposable error vectors for the given
. It is Verd us discovery that the decomposable error vectors
can be ignored in the union bound [11][18]. Thus, omitting
all the decomposable error vectors gives a tighter upper
bound, called the conditional Verd u bound (VB),
P
e,1
()

eF

1
2
W(e)
Pr[(b 2e) (b)[]. (10)
We note that F

1
includes all the error vectors with weight
one since they are always indecomposable.
With the LBA argument, the bound is further tightened to
give an improvement, called the conditional LBA Verd u bound
(LBA-VB).
P
e,1
()min
_
_
_
1,

eF

1
2
W(e)
Pr[ (b2e)(b)[]
_
_
_
.
(11)
The conditional LBA-VB is tighter than the conditional VB
(10) and conditional LBA-UB (7). It is, however, difcult to
obtain closed form expressions for the unconditional LBA-VB
and LBA-UB since averaging the conditional bounds (7) and
(11) with respect to the probability of requires complicated
multi-dimensional integrals, and we can only recourse to the
Monte-Carlo method to evaluate these bounds at the cost of
large computational complexity. Even for the VB, which is the
average of the conditional VB (10), no analytical expression
has not been reported yet and hence the Monte-Carlo method
is also used.
C. Modications to the decomposability
To reduce the difculty in averaging the conditional VB
over fading channels, we may modify the denition of the
decomposability. The modication that is most convenient
for analysis is to replace the non-negativity condition on
(e

, e

) with the non-negative deniteness of G(e

, e

),
which leads to the denition of the overall decomposability
since it then becomes decomposable in the sense of Verd u
for all [3][12][14]-[16]. We call the resulting bound the
overall decomposability bound (ODB). The ODB is, though
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 2
CHEN and HASHIMOTO: A NEW BER UPPER BOUND FOR MULTIUSER DOWNLINK SYSTEMS 1191
computable, much looser than the VB in general and hence is
not considered below.
In [13], Mohasseb et al. introduced a better modication.
Denition 2: Given , an error vector e is said positive-
sum-decomposable (PSD) if it satises (e) 0, where
(e) =
1
M
M

m=1

H
m

H(e)
m

H(e) =
K

i=1
K

j=1,j=i
A
i
A
j
e
i
e
j
(R
ij
+R
ji
).
The following lemma is proved in [13].
Lemma 1: An error vector e E
1
is decomposable if it is
PSD.
In [13], the average of the conditional bound with PSD
error vectors omitted is derived. We call the resultant bound
the PSD bound (PSDB) hereafter.
IV. NEW UPPER BOUND
To introduce a new bound, we rst revisit some expressions
related to the VB.
A. The standard bound
Given , the term
1

M
m=1
1[(ZAe)
H
n
m
] in (5) is
a Gaussian random variable with mean zero and variance
N0
2
S(e). Thus, we have an expression
Pr [(b 2e) (b)[ ] = Q
_
_
2
N
0
|S (e)|
_
using the Gaussian Q-function Q(x) =
1

2
_

x
e

1
2
t
2
dt.
We note, from (2), that the pdf of is given by p() =

M
m=1
p(
m
) =
LM
exp
_

M
m=1
|
m
|
2
_
. Then, aver-
aging both sides with respect to the probability of and
employing Craigs representation of the Gaussian Q-function
[19] in the same manner as in [16], we obtain the union bound
(UB)
P
e,1

eE1
2
W(e)
P
Whl
(e),
where, for H(e) given by (9), P
Whl
(e) is given by
P
Whl
(e) =
_
all
Q
_
_

2S(e)
N
0
_
_
p()d
=
1

_
2
0
det
_
I
L
+
H(e)
N
0
M sin
2

_
M
d. (12)
The subscript of P
Whl
(e) denotes the integration over the
whole region.
B. Derivation of the new bound
The VB is given as
P
e,1
E
_
_

eF

1
2
W(e)
Pr[(b 2e) (b)[]
_
_
=

eE1
2
W(e)
P
VD
(e), (13)
where
P
VD
(e) =
_
:eF

1
Q
_
_

2S(e)
N
0
_
_
p()d. (14)
and the subscript VD denotes the average under Verd us
decomposability condition.
We note that, as discussed below (10), an error vector e
with W(e) = 1 is indecomposable irrespective of and hence
satises P
VD
(e) = P
Whl
(e).
For an event c, let [c] be the selection function of c that
assumes one if c is true and zero otherwise. Then, for an error
vector e E
1
with W(e) > 1, we can modify P
VD
(e), by
rst making the indecomposability condition explicit and then
assuming the Craigs representation, as follows.
P
VD
(e) =
_
[(e

, e

) < 0, all e

, e

D
1
(e)]
Q
_
_

2S(e)
N
0
_
_
p()d
=
1

_
2
0
__
[(e

, e

) < 0, all e

, e

D
1
(e)]
exp
_

S(e)
N
0
M sin
2

_
p()d
_
d.
We note that, for each ( e

, e

)D
1
(e), the following inequal-
ity holds.
_
[(e

, e

) < 0, all e

, e

D
1
(e)]
exp
_

S(e)
N
0
M sin
2

_
p()d

_
( e

, e

)<0
exp
_

S(e)
N
0
sin
2

_
p()d
Thus, we have the desired upper bound P
MP
(e) of P
VD
(e)
P
MP
(e)
=
1

_
2
0
_

_
min
{e

,e

}D1(e)
_
(e

,e

)<0
exp
_

S(e)
N
0
sin
2

_
p()d
_

_
d
=
1

_
2
0
min
{e

,e

}D1(e)
(e

, e

, )d, (15)
where we let
(e

, e

, ) =
_
(e

,e

)<0
exp
_

S(e)
N
0
sin
2

_
p()d. (16)
The subscript MP denotes the minimal partition (MP)
bound.
The following theorem is proved in Appendix A.
Theorem 1: The function (e

, e

, ) is expressed as
(e

, e

, ) = (e

, e

, ) det
_
I
L
+
H(e)
N
0
sin
2

_
M
with a function (e

, e

, ) satisfying
(e

, e

, ) 1.
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 3
1192 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 61, NO. 3, MARCH 2013
Let
1
, ,
P
be the distinct nonzero eigenvalues of
G(e

, e

) relative
2
to I
L
+
H(e)
N0M sin
2

and let n
1
, , n
P
be
the associated multiplicities. Then, the function (e

, e

, ) is
expressed as
(e

, e

, ) =

p:p<0

p
where, for
p
= Mn
p
,

p
=
1
(
p
1)!
d
p1
ds
p1
_
_

q
_

M
q
_
q
s

q:q=p
_
s
M
q
_
q
_
_
s=
M
p
with the convention

q
=

P
q=1
.
Substituting the above (e

, e

, ) into (15) and letting

P
MP
(e) = P
Whl
(e) for e with W(e) = 1, we obtain a new
upper bound
P
e,1

eE1
2
W(e)
P
MP
(e). (17)
Comparison of (12) and (e

, e

, ) in the theorem reveals

that the new upper bound is no larger than the UB.
If G(e

, e

) is non-negative denite in the theorem, then all

l
are non-negative and hence we have (e

, e

, ) = 0. Thus,
we immediately have the following corollary, which implies
that the terms omitted in the ODB are also omitted from our
bound and hence that our bound improves the ODB.
Corollary 1: If e has an E
1
-partition (e

, e

) which makes
G(e

, e

) non-negative denite, then P

MP
(e) = 0.
Now, we make some comparison between the VB, PSDB,
and new bound. A formal expression for PSDB is obtained
from (13) and (14) with the replacement of the condition e
F

1
by the non PSD condition (e) < 0 as
P
e,1

eE1
2
W(e)
P
PSD
(e),
where
P
PSD
(e) =
_
: (e)<0
Q
_
_

2S(e)
N
0
_
_
p()d.
The following theorem is easy to show.
Theorem 2: When K = 2, the VB, PSDB, and new bound
are identical.
Proof: If K = 2, there exist only two types of error vectors
with weights equal to one and two, respectively. Since the
error vectors e of weight one are always indecomposable, the
VB, PSDB and new bound include the corresponding PEP
P
Whl
(e). For the weight two error vectors e = [e
1
, e
2
]
T
, e
i
,=
0, there exists just one way to decompose it into e = [e
1
, 0]
T
+
[0, e
2
]
T
, i.e., there is only one element in set D
1
(e). Thus, the
equality P
VD
(e) = P
MP
(E) holds. Moreover, it is easy to see
([e
1
, 0]
T
, [0, e
2
]
T
) = (e). These results conclude that the
VB, PSDB, and new bound are identical.
The following theorem, which is proved in Appendix B,
shows that every error vector omitted from the PSDB is also
2
The satisfying det[AB] = 0 is called the eigenvalues of A relative
to B, If B is a positive denite Hermitian matrix, then is the eigenvalue
of B

1
2 AB

1
2 .
omitted from our bound and hence that the number of terms
in the proposed bound (17) is less than or equal to the number
of terms in the PSDB.
Theorem 3: P
PSD
(e) = 0 implies P
MP
(e) = 0.
Unfortunately, the theorem does not necessarily assure
P
MP
(e) P
PSD
(e). Some discussions on this point will be
given later.
We notice that our integral form is simpler than the integral
form (43) in [13] since the latter requires multi-dimensional
integration. Although the PSDB was originally proposed for
uplink channels, the computational requirement when used for
downlink channels does not change considerably as seen in
Appendix C.
C. Looser upper bounds with low computational complexity
The bound (17) needs search for a pair (e

, e

) D(e)
minimizing (e

, e

, ) for each , which leads to a large

computational complexity when K is large. A computationally
less demanding form
P
MP
(e) min
(e

,e

)Di(e)
1

_
2
0
(e

, e

, )d
reduces the computation complexity at the cost of negligible
performance loss. Since error vectors with a large weight
in (17) are not inuential compared to error vectors with small
weights, we may also consider the following hybrid bound to
reduce the complexity for an appropriate threshold

W < K.
P
e,1

eE
1
W(e) W
2
W(e)
P
MP
(e) +

eE
1
W(e)> W
2
W(e)
P
Whl
(e)
V. NUMERICAL RESULTS
We compare the new analytical bound proposed in this
paper with known analytical bounds, UB and PSDB, and
with Monte-Carlo-based non-analytical bounds,
3
MC LBA,
MC VB, and MC LBA-VB. From the discussions in the last
two sections, we know the superiority relationships between
bounds: MC LBA-VB MC VB Proposed bound UB,
and MC LBA-VB MC LBA UB. We can conrm these
relationships through the following numerical results. Besides
these, we are interested in the relationships between the
proposed bound, PSDB, and MC-LBA. The theoretical results
up to here could not reveal the relationships, although our
bound has a great chance to surpass PSDB as the discussion
in Section IV-B. The last subsection will be devoted to some
partial discussions on the relationship.
MIMO channels have two aspects of advantage, increasing
communication reliability or/and transmission information rate
[22]. For the numerical comparison between bounds, we
consider two STS schemes in the following subsection. The
rst one is a diversity gain oriented STS scheme, while the
second one is an information rate oriented STS scheme. In
numerical comparison, we also consider an uplink system
since the PSDB was originally proposed for uplink systems.
3
MC stands for Monte-Carlo simulation.
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0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 1. Bounds for the rst STS scheme with L = 2 and K = 8, N = 15,
and M = 1 (equal power case).
A. Equal power scenarios
We rst consider an equal-power scenario, that is, A
k
= A
for all k. Because of the normalization (1), this assures that
the signals of all users are received with equal power at the
receiver.
The rst system used for evaluation is derived from the stan-
dard STS system [23] where Hurwitz-Radon matrices are used
to assign signature sequences to the respective transmitting
antennas. In this simulation, we employ M-sequences, instead
of orthogonal sequences, to introduce certain interference in
the system. In Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, we show the results for L = 2
and L = 4, respectively. The other parameters are N = 15,
K = 8, and M = 1. In these gures, the UB always gives the
worst results and, among the analytical bounds, the proposed
bound gives the best results. Among the Monte-Carlo-based
bounds, the MC LBA-UB always gives the worst results and
the MC LBA-VB gives the best ones. The MC VB gives
almost the same result as the proposed bound and both bounds
can not be distinguished in Fig. 1, while the MC VB gives a
result rather close to the MC LBA-VB in Fig. 2.
The second STS system used for evaluation is the one
proposed in [24], where each user, say user k, is assigned with
a PN sequence of length LN and L segments s
()
k
, = 1, ,
L, of the PN sequence are assigned to L antennas of the user.
In Fig. 3, we give results for N = 8, K = 8, L = 2, and
M = 2. The results lay somewhat between those of Fig. 1
and Fig. 2, and again we notice that the proposed bound gives
the best result among the three analytical bounds.
An uplink system can be emulated with the rst system
if there are more transmit antennas than users. That is, if
L K in the rst system, then we can assign different
antennas to different users and can emulate a synchronous
uplink transmission since each pair of a transmit antenna and
a receive antenna constitutes a link which are independent of
other such links. We note, however, that L in the normalization
(1) must be replaced with

L, the number of antennas assigned
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 2. Bounds for the rst STS scheme with L = 4 and K = 8, N = 15,
and M = 1 (equal power case).
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 3. Bounds for the second STS scheme with K = 8, L = 2, N = 8,
and M = 2 (equal power case).
to each user. In Fig. 4, we give numerical results for the
emulated uplink system, where the signal of each of 8 users
is spread by an M-sequence and is transmitted from one of
8 transmit antennas. This system, with transmitter parameters
K = 8, L = 8, and N = 15 and with receiver parameter
M = 1, emulates a synchronous uplink system consisting of
eight single-antenna mobile users and a single-antenna base
station as discussed in [12] and [13]. In this emulated uplink
system, the proposed bound and PSDB give almost the same
results, although the PSDB gives a little bit better result at low
SNRs. The MC LBA-UB does not give a good result again.
Since Theorem 3 claims that the proposed bound includes no
more terms than the PSDB, Fig. 4 seems to suggest that the
PSD criterion gives a smaller integral region for each error
pattern.
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0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 4. Bounds for the emulated uplink system with K=8, L=8, N=15, and
M=1 (equal power case).
We can summarize the results for the equal power sce-
nario as follows. For downlink transmission, we observed the
superiority ordering MC LBA-VB < MC VB < Proposed
bound < MC LBA-UB, PSDB < UB at a relatively large
SNR, while LBA-type bounds show better performance at
a small SNR. The superiority between MC LBA-UB and
PSDB is not xed. For uplink transmission, the superiority
ordering between bounds is basically the same as downlink
transmission with the exception that the performance of the
PSDB is almost the same as or slightly better than the
proposed bound.
B. Unequal power scenarios
BER characteristics become quite different when trans-
mit power can be different for each user. To simplify the
situation, we control only the transmit power of the unde-
sired users and consider two unequal-power scenarios: the
double-amplitude scenario and the half-amplitude scenario.
The double-amplitude scenario is that the desired user has
an amplitude double the amplitude of the rest of users, i.e.,
A
1
= A and A
k
=
1
2
A for k = 2, , K. The half-amplitude
scenario is that the desired user has an amplitude half the
amplitude of each of the other users, i.e., A
1
= A and
A
k
= 2A for k = 2, , K. We compute the bounds for
the downlink/uplink STS systems as in Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3,
and Fig. 4.
In Fig. 5 and Fig. 6, we give the bounds and simulation
results for the system considered in, respectively, Fig. 1 and
Fig. 2.
We can immediately notice that the simulation results for
both scenarios are almost the same. The reason may be that
ML multiuser detection, together with the low spectrum ef-
ciency of the system, could protect the desired user sufciently
against multiuser interference. The gures also reveal that all
the bounds give far looser results for the double-amplitude
scenario than for the half-amplitude scenario. Among the
0.01
0.1
1
0 5 10 15 20
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
double-amplitude
half-amplitude
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 5. Bounds for the rst STS scheme with L = 2 and K = 8, N = 15,
and M = 1 (unequal power case).
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
double-amplitude
half-amplitude
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 6. Bounds for the rst STS scheme with L = 4 and K = 8, N = 15,
and M = 1 (unequal power case).
analytical bounds, however, the proposed bound give the best
results.
In Fig. 7, we give the bounds and simulation results for the
systems considered in Fig. 3. We can observe the similar phe-
nomena as observed in Fig. 5 except that the simulation result
for the double-amplitude scenario becomes clearly worse than
for the half-amplitude scenario.
The reason for the respective behaviors of the bounds in the
two scenarios may be considered as follows. When an error
event of weight one is considered, its PEP does not depend on
the transmit power of the other users since no other users are
involved in the error. When we consider an error event e of
weight more than one, the matrix H(e) given in (9) includes
contributions from other users now and has larger diagonal
elements for the half-amplitude scenario than for the double-
amplitude scenario for the same the transmit power of the
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CHEN and HASHIMOTO: A NEW BER UPPER BOUND FOR MULTIUSER DOWNLINK SYSTEMS 1195
0.001
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
double-amplitude
half-amplitude
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 7. Bounds for the second STS scheme with K = 8, L = 2, N = 8,
and M = 2 (unequal power case).
0.01
0.1
1
0 2 4 6 8 10 12
B
E
R
SNR(dB)
double-amplitude
half-amplitude
UB
PSDB
Proposed bound
MC LBA-UB
MC VB
MC LBA-VB
Simulation
Fig. 8. Bounds for the emulated uplink system with K=8, L=8, N=15, and
M=1 (unequal power case).
desired user. If the interference between users are not quite
strong, then the quadratic form (8) gives a larger value for
the half-amplitude scenario and hence a smaller PEP for that
scenario.
In Fig. 8, we also show the results of the emulated uplink
transmission considered in Fig. 4. For the half-amplitude case,
the MC VB and MC LBA-VB can not be distinguished. Again,
we can deduce the same conclusion between the PSDB and
proposed bound as for Fig. 4.
We can summarize the results for the unequal power sce-
nario in the same manner as for the equal power scenario. The
only difference seems to be that all the bounds become quite
loose for the double-amplitude setting although simulation
results do not differ much.
C. Discussions on the proposed bound and PSDB
We have seen that the proposed bound gives performances
superior to the PSDB in the downlink simulation while its
performances are approximately equal to or slightly worse
than the PSDB in the uplink simulation. Although theoretical
comparison of the proposed bound and PSDB is difcult,
we can see some evidences that may support the above
observations.
For the following discussion, we introduce some notations.
An error vector p = [p
1
, , p
K
]
T
E is an error prole if
p
i
is either 0 or 1 for all i and let EP
1
is the set of all error
proles p such that p
1
= 1. An error vector e E is said
to have an error prole p if [e
i
[ = p
i
for all i. For an error
prole p EP
1
, let E
1
(p) be the set of all e E
1
with error
prole p. Especially, let E
+
1
(p) be the set of all e E
1
(p)
with e
1
= 1.
The following lemma is due to [20].
Lemma 2: For each p EP
1
, an error vector e E
+
1
(p)
is indecomposable if and only if
S(e) < min
eE
+
1
(p), e=e
S( e).
Since S(e) is a quadratic function of , we may conne our
discussion on the unit sphere dened by ||
2
= 1. On the unit
sphere, let us call the set of those that make S(e) minimum
in the sense of the lemma the region of e. We note that those
regions constitute a partition of the unit sphere. An additional
e E
+
1
(p) uniquely determines a partition e

, e

in such
a manner that e 2e

= e and the condition (e

, e

) = 0
gives a potential boundary between the regions of e and of e.
It is a potential boundary since the region of e is the union
of the subsets conned by these potential boundaries.
1) Downlink case: Let us consider the rst downlink
system with A
k
= 1 for all k, L = 2, K = 8, N = 15,
and M = 1, the system in Fig. 1, and let us consider an
error vector e = [+1, +1, +1, 0, , 0]
T
with an error
prole p = [1, 1, 1, 0, , 0]
T
, which involves only the
rst three users. To simplify the notation, we only consider
the rst three users and let the related error vectors be e
(0)
=
[+1, +1, +1]
T
, e
(1)
= [+1, 1, 1]
T
, e
(2)
= [+1, 1, +1]
T
,
and e
(3)
= [+1, +1, 1]
T
. Spreading sequences are assigned
as s
1
= [m
1
, m
2
], s
2
= [m
2
, m
1
], s
3
= [m
3
, m
4
] where
m
i
, i = 1, 2, 3, are M-sequences. For H(e) given in (9), S(e)
=
H
H(e) and, for the above error vectors, we have
H(e
(0)
) =
3
2
_
1
2
N
1
N
1
N
1 +
2
3N
_
,
H(e
(2)
) =
3
2
_
1 +
2
3N
1
N
1
N
1
2
N
_
,
and
H(e
(1)
) = H(e
(3)
) =
3
2
_
1 +
2
3N

1
3N

1
3N
1 +
2
3N
_
.
Since L = 2, the unit sphere is now a unit circle and
each point on the unit circle is uniquely specied by
an angle as
1
= cos and
2
= sin . Then, from
the symmetry of H(e
(0)
) and H(e
(2)
), we can see that the
condition ([1, 0, 1]
T
, [0, 1, 0]
T
) < 0, or equivalently the
condition S(e
(0)
) < S(e
(2)
), species a subset of the unit
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circle consisting of

4
< <

4
and
3
4
< <
5
4
. On the
other hand, the inequalities
1
2
_
S(e
(0)
) +S(e
(2)
)

S(e
(i)
),
i = 1, 3, imply that e
(1)
and e
(3)
are always decomposable.
Since there are only two regions and the boundary between
them is given by a single condition ([1, 0, 1]
T
, [0, 1, 0]
T
) =
0, we must have P
VD
(e) = P
MP
(e), which partially explain
the evidence that the proposed bound and VB almost coincide
in Fig. 1.
For the PSDB, on the other hand, we have ([1, 1, 1]
T
) =

H([1, 1, 1]
T
) for

H([1, 1, 1]
T
) =
_

3
N
1
N
1
N
1
N
_
A simple geometric considerations reveals that the subset
determined by the condition ([1, 1, 1]
T
) < 0 consists of
tan
1
3 < <

4
and tan
1
3 < < +

4
. This
range is wider than the region for e
(0)
and hence P
PSD
(e) >
P
MP
(e).
A similar situation is expected whenever L is not large
compared to K.
2) Uplink case: In the emulated uplink transmission with
K = L and M = 1, every channel coefcient is uniquely asso-
ciated to an user, and we have S(e) =
H
diag(e)Fdiag(e),
where F is a KK matrix with its (i, j) element r
i,j
= s
H
i
s
j
and, when the M-sequences are employed, is given by
F =
N + 1
N
I
K

1
N
1
K
1
T
K
,
where I
K
is the KK identity matrix and 1
K
is the all-one
vector of length K. It is not difcult to see that the matrix F
has the minimum eigenvalue
1
=
N+1K
N
for the associated
eigenvector v
1
= 1
K
and K1 duplicated eigenvalues
k
=
N+1
N
for the associated eigenvectors v
k
perpendicular to 1
K
.
In the following discussions, we consider an all-one error
prole p with p
i
= 1 for all i and consider an e E
+
1
(p).
For other case, we can safely discard correctly detected users
from our consideration due to the uniform cross-correlation
property of the M-sequences.
From the property of F, we can see that S(e) takes its
minimum
N+1K
N
for parallel to e on the unit sphere
||
2
= 1. If e
1
E
+
1
(p) is different from e E
+
1
(p)
only at one position, say at the last position, then the partition
e

, e

of e associated with e
1
is given by e

which is all
zero except at the last position. It is not difcult to see, on
the unit sphere, that (e

, e

) = 0 occurs at the midpoint

between that minimize S(e) and
1
that minimize S(e
1
)
and that S(e) assumes
N+2K
N
at the midpoint. The error
vector e has at least K such neighbouring error vectors as
e
1
and S(e) assumes the same value at the midpoints on
the respective boundaries. Thus, any particular choice of a
condition (e

, e

) < 0 may not uniquely minimize P

MP
(e).
On the other hand, the PSD condition (e) < 0 is equivalent
to S(e) < 1 and the associated integral region includes all the
K midpoints on the boundary discussed above when K > 2.
When K is small compared to N, however, the values of
S(e) at those midpoints are not quite different from one. Then
the PSDB has more chances to be better than the proposed
bound since the area of the integral region is smaller for
the PSDB than for our bound. This conclusion seems to
hold whenever the signature sequences have a uniform cross-
correlation property like M-sequences and L is large compared
to K.
The above conclusion is based on the assumption that M-
sequences are used and may not hold if other sequences
are used. In fact, although the result is not shown here, the
small superiority of PSDB completely disappear when random
sequences are employed.
VI. CONCLUSION
After reviewing the denition of IEVs and its extensions,
we proposed a new closed-form BER upper bound for the ML
receiver over downlink MIMO fading channels. The proposed
upper bound was shown to include less terms than the positive-
sum-decomposability bound (PSDB), which was originally
proposed for uplink channels, and shown to be better than
known analytical bounds including the PSDB by simulation
over downlink MIMO channels. We expect that the proposed
bound is superior to PSDB whenever L is small compared
to K. An interesting observation is that the proposed bound
may be also useful for uplink channels and give results quite
close to, though a little bit worse than in low SNR regions,
the PSDB, which was originally proposed for uplink channels.
Thus, the proposed bound seems to give almost the best results
for both uplink and downlink channels.
APPENDIX A
PROOF OF THEOREM 1
From the denition (16), we have
(e

, e

, ) =
_

_
(e

,e

)<0
exp
_

M
m=1

H
m
H(e)
m
N
0
M sin
2

ML
exp
_

m=1

H
m

m
_
d
1
d
M
=
_

_
(e

,e

)<0
1

ML
exp
_

m=1

H
m
_
I +
H(e)
N
0
M sin
2

m
_
d
1
d
M
We make some transformations to simplify the integration.
First we consider the eigenvalue decomposition
I +
H(e)
N
0
M sin
2

= U
H
ih

ih
U
ih
where U
ih
is a unitary matrix,
ih
is a diagonal matrix
consisting of eigenvalues of I+H(e)/N
0
M sin
2
. Since
ih
is positive-denite, we let

m
= [

m,1
, ,

m,L
]
T
=
1
2
ih
U
ih

m
, m = 1, , M.
Then, we have a transformation
m
= U
H
ih

1
2
ih

m
and
(e

, e

) =
1
M
M

m=1

H
m
F

m
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where F =

1
2
ih
U
ih
G(e

, e

)U
H
ih

1
2
ih
. Moreover, the above
transformation gives
(e

, e

, ) =
_

_
(e

,e

)<0
1

ML
exp
_

m=1

H
m

m
_
[J[d

1
d

M
where J is Jacobian matrix and
[J[ = det
_
I +
H(e)
N
0
M sin
2

_
M
.
Since F is also a Hermitian matrix, we next consider another
eigenvalue decomposition F = U
f

f
U
f
. Then, we have
(e

, e

)=
1
M
M

m=1

H
m
F

m
=
1
M
M

m=1
(U
f

m
)
H

f
(U
f

m
)
=
1
M
M

m=1

H
m

m
where we let

m
= [

m,1
, ,

m,L
] = U
f

m
and

= U
H
f

for m = 1, , M. Thus,
(e

, e

, )=[J[
_

_
(e

,e

)<0
1

ML
exp
_

m=1

H
m

m
_
d

1
d

M
.
We note that

m,l
, l = 1, , L, m = 1, , M maybe
considered i.i.d. complex-valued Gaussian variables with zero
mean and variance 1. Thus, we have
(e

, e

, ) = [J[ Pr
_
1
M
M

m=1

H
m

m
< 0
_
.
We recall (e

, e

) that, for
f
= diag(

1
, ,

L
),
(e

, e

) =
1
M
M

m=0

H
m

m
=
L

l=1

l
_
1
M
M

m=1
[

l,m
[
2
_
The probability density function (PDF) of [

l,m
[
2
is an expo-
nential function as
f
|

l,m|
2(x) =
_
e
x
, x 0
0, x < 0
.
Then the characteristic function of [

l,m
[
2
is
1
1 j
.
For

l
,= 0, we attain the characteristic function of (e

, e

)
as

(j) =
L

l=1

l=0
1
(1 j

l
M
)
M
. (18)
Let
p
, p = 1, , P denote the distinct nonzero eigenvalues
of F with multiplicities n
1
, , n
P
, respectively. We rewrite
(18) as

(j) =
P

p=1
1
(1 j
p
M
)
Mnp
From Levy formula [25]
Pr[(e

, e

) < x
2
] Pr[(e

, e

) < x
1
]
=
1
2
lim
r
_
r
r
e
jx1
e
jx2
j

(j)d,
with x
2
= and x
1
= 0, we have
Pr[(e

, e

) 0] =
1
2
_
j
j
1
j

(j)d
where a small positive number has been inserted in order
to move the path of integration away from the singularity at
= 0 and it must be positive in order to satisfy Pr[(e

, e

)
0] = 1 when
p
0 for all p.
Let s = j, we have
Pr[(e

, e

) 0] =
1
2j
_
+j
j
1
s
P

p=1
_

M
p
_
Mnp
_
s
M
p
_
Mnp
ds.
Let us consider the integral path made up of the line
segment, called line A, joining the points j , + j,
and a half circle with radius r, called line B, beginning at the
second and ending at the rst of these two points and lying
in the left-half plane. For line B,

1
2j
_
line B
1
s
P

p=1
_

M
p
_
Mnp
_
s
M
p
_
Mnp
ds

1
2
_
line B
P

p=1

M
p
s
M
p

Mnp
1
[s[
ds 0 as r .
Then, we have the following result
Pr[(e

, e

) 0] = lim
r
1
2j
_

1
s
P

p=1
_

M
p
_
Mnp
_
s
M
p
_
Mnp
ds
= 1 +

:
p
<0

where

p
=
1
(Mn
p
1)!
d
Mn
p
1
ds
Mn
p
1
_

_
1
s
P

p=1
_

M
p
_
Mnp
P

p=1
p=
p

_
s
M
p
_
Mnp
_

s=
M

.
We conclude that
(e

, e

, ) = det
_
I +
H(e)
N
0
M sin
2

_
M

:
p
<0

p
.
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For Further Details-A Vinay 9030333433,0877-2261612 9
1198 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 61, NO. 3, MARCH 2013
APPENDIX B
PROOF OF THEOREM 3
For a given , let
a
i,j
=
A
i
A
j
e
i
e
j
M
M

m=1

H
m
(R
ij
+R
ji
)
m
Then, for an error vector e, we have (e) = 2

i,j;i<j
a
i,j
. In
the rest of the proof, we x an e and and let = (e). We
show that 0 ensures the existence of e

, e

D
1
(e)
such that (e

, e

) 0.
Let / = 1, 2, , K. Then, an E
1
partition e

, e

of e
is characterized by a subset /
o
/ satisfying 1 , /
o
and /
o
,= in such a manner that e

i
= 0 for i /
c
o
and e

j
= 0 for j
/
o
, and we have (e

, e

) =

iK
c
o

jKo
a
i,j
, where /
c
o
is the complement in /. Now, let (/
o
) =

iK
c
o

jKo
a
i,j
and let T
K
be the set of all such subsets /
o
. We show that
there exists at least one /
o
T
K
satisfying (/
o
) 0
whenever 0.
According to combinatoric arguments, we can see that there
are

K1
k=1
_
K 1
k
_
distinct subsets in T
K
. For a given /
o
, we
say that a pair i, j is a feasible pair if i /
c
o
and j /
o
or if i /
c
o
and j /
o
.
First, let us consider a pair i, j such that i, j ,= 1 and i ,=
j. Then, among
_
K 1
k
_
subsets /
o
with [/
o
[ = k, 2
_
K 3
k 1
_
of them make i, j feasible. From this, the number of subsets
in T
K
which make i, j feasible is 2

K2
m=1
_
K 3
k 1
_
= 2
K2
.
Next, let us consider a pair i, j such that i = 1 and i ,=
j. Then, among subsets /
o
with [/
o
[ = k,
_
K 1
k 1
_
of them
make i, j feasible. From this, the number of subsets in T
K
which make i, j feasible is

K1
m=1
_
K 1
k 1
_
= 2
K2
. Thus,
we conclude that every pair i, j, i ,= j, is made feasible
with exactly 2
K2
subsets in T
K
, and we have

all KoFK
(/
o
) = 2
K3

This shows that, if the right-hand side is non-negative, there
exists at least one /
o
which makes (/
o
) non-negative and
completes the proof.
APPENDIX C
DERIVATION OF PSDB FOR OUR DOWNLINK SYSTEMS
From the PSD denition, its pairwise error probability can
be attain as
P
PSD
(e) =
_

Q
_
_

2S(e)
N
0
_
_
[ (e) < 0] p()d
=
_

0
Q
_
_
2X
N
0
_
_
0

p
X,
(X, v)dvdx
where X = S(e) =
H
H(e) and p
X,
(X, v) is joint pdf by
noting (e) < 0. Since X and (e) are two quadratic forms
of the same channel path coefcients, their joint characteristic
function can be written as

X
(
X

) =
1
det
_
I
L
j
X
AH(e) j

A

H(e)
_.
We simplify the determinant as
det
_
I
L
j
X
AH(e) j

A

H(e)
_
= det[U
H
i
]det[
i
j
X
U
i
AH(e)U
H
i
]det[U
i
]
= det[
i
]det[I
L
j
X

W
X
]
where U
H
i

i
U
i
is the eigenvalue decomposition of I
L

j

A

H(e) and

W
X
=
1
i
U
i
AH(e)U
H
i
. Therefore,
P
PSD
(e)
=
1
2j
_

0
_
0

Q
_
_
2X
N
0
_

X
(
X
,

)
exp(j
X
x j

v)d
X
d

dvdx
=
1
2j
_
0

_
1
2j
_

0
_

Q
__
2X
N0
_
exp(j
X
x)
det[
i
]det[I
L
j
X

W
X
]
d
X
dx
_
_
exp(j

v) d

dv
=
1
2j
_
0

1
det[]
_
_

i(

WX)0
((

W
X
))
2

_
_
1
1
_
1 +
N0
i(

Wx)
_
_
_
_
exp(j

v)d

dv
where
i
(

W
X
) is the eigenvalue of

W
X
and
((

W
X
)) =
L

i=1,i=j,(

WX)=0

i
(

W
X
)

j
(

W
X
)
i
(

W
X
)
.
We notice that a double integral is remained, thus solving
the eigenvalues of

W
X
for every

and v, sampled from
to and from to 0 respectively, is necessary while
calculating numerical results. Therefore, its computation is
large.
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CHEN and HASHIMOTO: A NEW BER UPPER BOUND FOR MULTIUSER DOWNLINK SYSTEMS 1199
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1985.
Dianjun Chen received the B.S. degree in electronic
engineering from Fudan University, Shanghai, in
1988, the M.E. degree in radio engineering from
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
(BUPT) in 1993, and the Ph.D. degree from the
University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, in
2006. He is an associate professor at BUPT. His
current research interests include multiple antennas
systems and CDMA systems.
Takeshi Hashimoto was born in Ibaraki Pref.,
Japan, in 1952. He received the B.Es., M.Es and
D.E. from Osaka University, respectively, in 1975,
1977, and 1981. He was a Research Assistant in
Osaka University from 1979 to 1986, was an Associ-
ated Professor in Tokyo Denki University from 1986
to 1992, and is a Professor in University of Electro-
Communications, Tokyo, Japan. His main interests
are on information theory and its application.
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