IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO.

3, MARCH 2007

805

On the Performance of the MIMO Zero-Forcing Receiver in the

Presence of Channel Estimation Error
Cheng Wang, Student Member, IEEE, Edward K. S. Au, Student Member, IEEE,
Ross D. Murch, Senior Member, IEEE, Wai Ho Mow, Senior Member, IEEE, Roger S. Cheng, Member, IEEE,
and Vincent Lau, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract By employing spatial multiplexing, Multiple-Input

Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless antenna systems provide increases in capacity without the need for additional spectrum
or power. Zero-Forcing (ZF) detection is a simple and effective
technique for retrieving multiple transmitted data streams at
the receiver. However the detection requires knowledge of the
channel state information (CSI) and in practice accurate CSI may
not be available. In this letter, we investigate the effect of channel
estimation error on the performance of MIMO ZF receivers
in uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channels. By modeling
the estimation error as independent complex Gaussian random
variables, tight approximations for both the post-processing SNR
distribution and bit error rate (BER) for MIMO ZF receivers
with M-QAM and M-PSK modulated signals are derived in
closed-form. Numerical results demonstrate the tightness of our
analysis.
Index Terms MIMO, MIMO ZF receiver, channel estimation
error.

I. I NTRODUCTION

ULTIPLE-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) wireless antenna systems have been recognized as a key technology for future wireless communications. One common
approach to exploit the capacity of MIMO systems is to
employ spatial multiplexing where independent information
streams are transmitted from the antennas. These information streams are then separated at the receiver by means of
appropriate signal processing techniques such as maximum
likelihood (ML) which achieves optimal performance or linear
receivers like Zero-Forcing (ZF) which provide sub-optimal
performance but offer significant computational complexity
reduction with tolerable performance degradation. In these
receiver structures however accurate channel state information
(CSI) is essential for their proper operation.
In this letter we investigate the performance of MIMO
ZF receivers in the presence of channel estimation error. In
practice accurate CSI will not always be available and it is
thus important to be able to characterize the performance
of MIMO receivers in the presence of channel estimation
error. In previous work [1], [2] provide an exponentially tight
upper bound for the performance of MIMO ZF receivers and
Manuscript received May 24, 2005; revised March 05, 2006; accepted April
27, 2006. The editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it
for publication is T. Guess. This work was supported by the Hong Kong RGC
grant HKUST 6149/03E.
The authors are with the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water
Bay, Hong Kong (email: {eeelva, eeedward}@ust.hk; {eermurch, eewhmow,
eecheng, eeknlau}@ee.ust.hk).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TWC.2007.05384.

tight approximations of BER using M-PSK and M-QAM in

uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channels have been derived
in [3]. However little is known about the BER performance
of MIMO ZF receiver in the presence of channel estimation
error. In [4], the error floor due to channel estimation error
for MIMO ZF receiver is analyzed and the focus is on the
approximation of the pre-processing signal to noise ratio
(SNR). However they do not consider the effect of channel
estimation error on the MIMO ZF receiver by the pseudoinverse of the inaccurate channel estimate.
Our work is different in that we focus on the effect of channel estimation error on the post-processing SNR of MIMO ZF
receiver in uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channels with
Nt transmit antennas and Nr receive antennas. By modeling
the estimation error as independent complex Gaussian random
variables [5], [6], we show that approximately the postprocessing SNR of each data stream is a weighted chi-square
distributed random variable with 2(Nr Nt + 1) degrees
of freedom, where the weight is a function of the channel
estimation error and the number of transmit antennas Nt .
This is a very important result as the post-processing SNR
distribution can be straightforwardly applied to a variety of
applications, such as the derivation of the explicit expression
for outage probability and bit error rate for example. Based
on the post-processing SNR distribution, we then obtain tight
closed-form approximations for the BER of MIMO ZF receiver for M-QAM and M-PSK modulated signals. Numerical
results demonstrate the tightness of our analysis.
The remainder of this letter is organized as follows. The
system model is introduced in the next section while in section
III, we derive tight closed-form BER approximations for the
ZF receiver in the presence of channel estimation error. Section IV provides the BER performance comparison between
the simulation results and our approximation. Conclusions are
drawn in section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
We consider a MIMO system with Nt transmit antennas and
Nr receive antennas, where Nt Nr . The MIMO channel is
modeled as an uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channel and
can be denoted by a Nr Nt matrix H with zero mean unit
variance i.i.d complex Gaussian entries. We assume that the
channel state information is not available at the transmitter
and the symbol energy per transmit antenna is assumed to be
equal to Es , then the Nr 1 received signal vector r can be
expressed as
r = Hs + n,
(1)

c 2007 IEEE
1536-1276/07$25.00 

806

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, MARCH 2007

where s denotes the transmit data symbol vector consisting of

Nt symbols each with a constellation size M and E[ssH ] =
Es INt , H represents the complex conjugate transpose, E[]
denotes expectation operation and IN is the identity matrix
of size N N and n CN (0, N0 INr ) is the additive white
Gaussian noise vector.
If perfect CSI (complex channel gain matrix) is available
at the receiver, the zero-forcing estimate of the transmitted
symbol vector can be written as

Assume e << 1, then the pseudo-inverse of the estimated

channel matrix can be approximated by the linear part of the
Taylor expansion as



(9)
G
= H INr eH .

r = G(Hs + n) = s + Gn,
(2)


1 H
where G = H = HH H
H , denotes the pseudoinverse operation.
However in practice the complex channel gain matrix H has
to be estimated at the receiver for retrieving the transmitted
data symbol vector and imperfect channel estimates arise
in any practical estimation scheme. Following the channel
estimation model for MIMO systems in [5] and [6], we model
the noisy channel estimates as

From the above expression we observe that the last two

terms are additional interference and noise introduced by the
channel estimation error.
= H n eH s
We denote the last three terms as n

eH H n and refer to it as the effective post-processing

noise. In Appendix I we show that the covariance matrix of
can be expressed as
n
 H
n

E n


1   H 1
2
2
H
H H
= N0 + e Nt Es + e N0 tr H H
,

= H + e,
H

Substituting (9) into (7), the zero-forcing estimate of the

transmitted symbol vector can be further expressed as
r = s + H n eH s eH H n.

(10)

(3)

(11)

where e is the estimation error that is uncorrelated with H,

the entries of are i.i.d zero-mean complex Gaussian [5], [6],
with unity variance and e is the measure of how accurate the
channel estimation is. The correlation coefficient between the
actual channel gain and its estimate, which is assumed to be
the same for all gains, is given by


E hij
hij
=  
  
 2 
2
hij 
E hij  E 

Based on (11), the post-processing SNR per symbol of the

k th stream can be expressed as

Es N0


k =


1 
1  ,
1 + e2 Nt Es N0 + e2 tr HH H
HH H

1
=
1 + e2

(4)

ij represent the (i, j)th element of H and H

where hij , h
respectively and denotes the complex conjugate operation.
We define the normalized mean square error (NMSE) of the
channel estimation as

 
ij 2
E hij h
   ,
(5)
N M SE =
2
E hij 
and it can be easily shown that the NMSE is related to e by
N M SE = e2 .

(6)

III. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS

A. Derivation of the Approximate BER Expression for ZF
Receiver
In the presence of channel estimation error, the zero-forcing
estimate of the transmitted symbol vector can be written as

where

r = G(Hs
+ n),

(7)



=H
= H + e ,
G

(8)

k = 1, 2, . . . , Nt ,

kk

(12)

tr() denotes the matrix trace operation and

where

1
 H 1 
denotes the (k, k)th elements of HH H
.
H H
kk
Since the elements of H are i.i.d. complex Gaussian random
variables with zero-mean and unity variance, it is well known
H
Wishart distributed: HH H
that H
 H is central complex
 H 1
C
WNt Nr , INt . Then H H
is complex inverse Wishart
distributed with Nr degrees of freedom. According to [7] and
[8], when Nr > Nt , one has
 


1 
Nt
E tr HH H
,
(13)
=
Nr Nt
and when Nr > Nt + 1,
 

 H 1 
2
E tr H H

Nr
Nt
Nt 1
=
+
. (14)
Nr Nt (Nr Nt )2 1 Nr Nt + 1
(13) and (14), we obtain the variance of
From
 H 1 
for Nr > Nt + 1 as
tr H H
 

 H 1 
NN
 t r
.
V ar tr H H
=
(Nr Nt )2 (Nr Nt )2 1
(15)
For practical numbers of transmit and
we
receiveantennas,

1
H
can see from (13) that the mean of tr H H
is quite
small when Nr > Nt , as it is no larger than the number
of transmit antennas. Observing (15) we can see that the

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, MARCH 2007

Nt=4, Nr=5

10

10

Nt=4, Nr=6

10

CDF

CDF

10

10

tr((H H) )

10

10

Nt=2, N r=6

10

Nt=4, N r=4

10

tr((HHH)1)

10

CDF

10

CDF

denominator is at least 12 since Nr > Nt +1, so the variance is

also quite small for practical numbers of transmit
and receive

1 
antennas. In Fig. 1 we provide CDFs of tr HH H
for
these two cases with Nt = 4, Nr = 6, Nt = 4, Nr = 5 and
Nt = 2, Nr = 6.
 MIMO case where Nr = Nt ,
For the square
1
H
does not exist. However as we
the mean of tr H H
can see from the CDF
we
show
in Fig. 1 with Nt = Nr = 4,

1 
H
to be large is still small.
the probability of tr H H

1 
2
After scaled by e with e << 1, the term e2 tr HH H
in (12) can be neglected. So (12) can be further expressed as

Es N0
k = 
 
1  ,
1 + e2 Nt Es N0 HH H

807

10

kk

k = 1, 2, . . . , Nt .

(16)


1 
From [1], [2] we know that 1
HH H
is a chikk
square distributed random variable with 2(Nr Nt +1) degrees
of freedom. Since the SNR distribution of each stream is the
same, we drop the subscript k and denote the SNR per symbol
of each stream as = s x, where
s =

Es /N0
,
1 + e2 Nt Es /N0

(17)

and x is a chi-square distributed random variable with 2(Nr

Nt + 1) degrees of freedom.
In [10], by recognizing the regular patterns in the bit error
probability, the authors obtain the BER expression for MQAM in AWGN channel as

M (12k ) M 1 

log2
 k1 


i2
2

Pb =
(1)
M log2 M k=1
i=0



 i 2k1
1
3
s x
k1
2
+

Q (2i + 1)
, (18)
2
M 1
M

where y represents the largest integer that is no larger than

y. And in [9] tight BER approximation for M-PSK in AWGN
channel is obtained by a simple geometric approach that is
based on signal-space concepts as

10

Fig. 1.

0.5

tr((HHH)1)

1.5

10

10

20

tr((HHH)1)

30

40

CDF of tr((HH H)1 ) with various antenna configurations.

estimation error:

log2 M (12 ) M1


2

BERMQAM
=
M log2 M k=1
i=0


 k1 

 i 2k1
i2
1

k1
M
+

(1)
2
2
M

D

D+1 
j 
1
D+j 1
(1 + i )
(1 i )
j
2
2
j=0


where i =
BERMP SK
=

(20)
3(2i + 1)2 s
, D = Nr Nt .
2(M 1) + 3(2i + 1)2 s

2
max(log2 M, 2)



min(2,M/4)


i=1

D+1 
j 
1
D + j 1
(1 i )
(1 + i )
,
j
2
2
j=0

(21)


s sin2 (2i 1)/M

 , D = Nr Nt .
where i =
1 + s sin2 (2i 1)/M
If only the dominant terms (i = 0, 1) in (20) are considered

min(2,M/4)

[10],
we obtain


(2i 1)
2
Pb
Q
2
s x sin
,
=
max(log2 M, 2)
M
i=1
(19)

where M/4 represents the smallest integer that is no smaller

than M/4 and the maximum number of summation terms in
(19) is 2 because it is suggested in [9] that the summation of
the first 2 terms already provides a very accurate approximation.
By averaging (18) and (19) over the chi-square distributed
random variable x [12], we obtain the approximate BER
expression for MIMO ZF receiver in the presence of channel

BERM QAM

2( M 1)
=
M log2 M

2( M 2)

+
M log2 M


D 
D+1 
1
D+j
(1 0 )
j
2
j=0

D 
D+1 
1
D+j
(1 1 )
j
2
j=0

j
1
(1 + 0 )
2
j
1
(1 + 1 )
2

(22)

Note that (20) and (22) are for M-ary square QAM constellations, however it is very easy and straightforward to derive
BER formula for PAM and rectangular QAM constellations
in a similar manner.

808

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, MARCH 2007

0

10

B. Effect of Channel Estimation Error on the BER performance of ZF Receiver

e << 1 and Nt is relatively small, then s 21 >> 1.

e Nt
1
and
by
taking
the
linear
part of the
In this case 21 (1 + )
=
expansion [11]
3
1
5
(1 + x)1/2 = 1 x + x2 x3 + (x2 < 1), (24)
2
8
16
1 for BPSK and 1 (1 )
1 for
we get 21 (1 )
= 4
= 2
s
2
s
QPSK. Furthermore, since [11]


D+j
2D + 1
=
,
(25)
j
D+1
j=0

the expression of the error floor for BPSK and QPSK modulation can be simplified as

2 D+1

e Nt
2D + 1
EFBP SK =
,
(26)
D+1
4

2 D+1

e Nt
2D + 1
EFBP SK =
,
(27)
D+1
2
when e << 1 and Nt is relatively small.

10

BER

10

10

Simu e=0%
Appro e=0%
Simu e=5%
Appro e=5%
Simu e=10%
Appro e=10%
Simu e=20%
Appro e=20%

10

10

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Eb/No per transmit antenna (dB)

Fig. 2. BER performance of BPSK MIMO ZF receiver using ML channel

estimator with Nt = Nr = 4.
1

10

10

BER

From a close observation of (16) we can see that the channel

estimation error induces two effects on the BER performance:
1) Dependence on Nt
When there is no channel estimation error, given Es /N0 ,
M, the BER performance is only a function of D, i.e. the
difference between Nr and Nt . While in the presence of
channel estimation error, the BER performance is a function
of not only the difference D but also a function of Nt . With
the same D, BER increases as Nt increases.
Intuitively the reason for the dependence on Nt is that the
inter-stream interference cannot be cancelled perfectly in the
presence of channel estimation error. As Nt increases, the
number of data streams increases. Given the same transmit
power per antenna, the source of the interference increases.
As a result the BER performance gets worse as Nt increases.
2) Error Floor
When there is no channel estimation error, as Es /N0
, s , BER 0. While in the presence of channel
estimation error, as Es /N0 , s 21 , which means
e Nt
an error floor is expected at high SNR due to the channel
estimation error. Moreover as Nt and/or e increases, the SNR
value corresponding to the starting point of the error floor
decreases. And the value of the error floor can be calculated
by substituting s = 21 into (21) for M-PSK and (20)
e Nt
or (22) for M-QAM modulation. In the following we derive
two simple approximate expressions of the error floor for the
special case of BPSK and QPSK.
The approximate BER expression for BPSK and QPSK is

D

D+1 
j
1
D + j 1
(1 )
(1 + ) ,
(23)
j
2
2
j=0


s )1/2 for BPSK and =

where = 1 +s = (1 + 1/
s

s
s )1/2 for QPSK. Assume Es /N0 ,
2 + = (1+2/

10

Simu e=0%
Appro e=0%
Simu e=5%
Appro e=5%
Simu e=10%
Appro e=10%
Simu e=20%
Appro e=20%

10

10

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Eb/No per transmit antenna (dB)

Fig. 3. BER performance of QPSK MIMO ZF receiver in the presence of

channel estimation error with Nt = 4, Nr = 5.

IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS

In this section, Monte Carlo simulations are used to illustrate the impact of channel estimation error on the BER performance of MIMO ZF receiver and also verify our analytical
derivation.

1 
for systems
Fig. 1 provides the CDFs of tr HH H
with Nt = 4, Nr = 6, Nt = 4, Nr = 5 and Nt = 2, Nr =
6 and Nt = Nr = 4. It shows that the probability of

1
being large is very small, and this numerically
tr HH H
justifies our approximation in (16).
In Fig. 2, BER performance of BPSK modulation is
investigated for Nt = Nr = 4 system which employs
maximum-likelihood (ML) channel estimation. In the training
phase,
the input-output relationship can be written as Y =

Etrain HS
train + W, where the Nt Ntrain matrix Strain
Nt


with tr Strain SH
train = Nt Ntrain is the matrix of training
symbols sent over Ntrain Nt time samples and is known

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, MARCH 2007

0

10

10

Simu e=0%
Appro e=0%
Simu e=5%
Appro e=5%
Simu e=10%
Appro e=10%
Simu e=20%
Appro e=20%

10

e=20%
2

10

10

BER

BER

809

10

e=10%

e=5%
3

10

10

Simu N t=4, Nr=5

Appro Nt=4, Nr=5
Simu N t=3, Nr=4
Appro Nt=3, Nr=4

10

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Eb/No per transmit antenna (dB)

Fig. 4. BER performance of 16QAM MIMO ZF receiver in the presence of

channel estimation error with Nt = 4, Nr = 6.

to the receiver, Y is the received matrix and W is the

noise matrix.
The ML estimate of the channel is given by


1
N
H
H
t

H =
. According to [5],
Etrain YStrain Strain Strain
[6], the optimal Strain for the ML channel estimator takes
the form of Strain = Ntrain , where H = INt and
the resulting Nt Nr estimation errors are independent and


Nt
identically distributed as CN 0,
. In the
Ntrain Etrain /N0
simulation we set Ntrain = Nt , so the relationship between
the SNR of the training phase and the quality of the channel
estimation is given by Etrain /N0 = 1/e2 . Note that we use the
un-normalized estimate in the paper because the relationship
between the training SNR and the quality of the channel
estimation is not explicitly known for some channel estimation
algorithms. We test three cases with e = 5%, 10%, 20% and
tune the Etrain /N0 accordingly. From the figure we can see
that our analysis, i.e. (21), shows very good agreement with
the simulation results, where Eb /N0 = Es /(M N0 ). And
we observe that the BER performance of MIMO ZF receiver
is quite sensitive to channel estimation error and degrades
significantly as e increases. According to our approximation
in (26), the error floor for BPSK with Nt = Nr = 4 would
be 2.5 103 and 1 102 for e = 5% and e = 10%
respectively. These results agree very well with our simulation
results shown in Fig. 2.
In Fig. 3-Fig. 4, BER performance of QPSK and 16QAM
modulations is investigated for system with Nt = 4, Nr = 5
and Nt = 4, Nr = 6 respectively for e = 5%, 10%, 20% using
the channel estimation error model in (3). Again these figures
demonstrate the tightness of our analysis, i.e. (21) and (22).
For e = 5%, 10%, according to our approximation in (27)
the error floor for QPSK with Nt = 4, Nr = 5 would be
7.5 105, 1.2 103 respectively, and these agree with our
simulation results in Fig. 3.
In Fig. 5, the effect of the number of transmit antennas
Nt on the BER performance of QPSK is investigated with
D = 1. The simulation results agree with our analysis that as
Nt increases the BER gets worse with the same value of D
and e.

10

10

e=0
15

20

25

30

35

40

Eb/No per transmit antenna (dB)

Fig. 5. BER performance comparison of QPSK MIMO ZF receiver in system

with Nt = 4, Nr = 5 versus Nt = 3, Nr = 4 in the presence of channel
estimation error.

V. C ONCLUSION
In this letter, performance of MIMO ZF receivers over
uncorrelated Rayleigh flat fading channels in the presence of
channel estimation error is investigated. Approximate postprocessing SNR distribution and tight closed-form approximations for the BER expression of M-QAM and M-PSK are
derived. It is found that contrary to the case when there is
no channel estimation error, the BER performance of MIMO
ZF receiver is not only a function of D = Nr Nt , but
also a function of Nt . Besides, for the same value of D and
e the BER performance gets worse as Nt increases. Another
impact of imperfect channel estimation is that when SNR is
high, BER does not approach zero but approaches an error
floor whose value depends on Nt , Nr and e.
A PPENDIX I
In this appendix, we derive the covariance matrix of the
of MIMO ZF receiver in the
effective post-processing noise n
presence of channel estimation error.
= H n eH s eH H n, the covariance
Since n
matrix can be computed as
 H
n

E n


=E H n eH s eH H n
H 

H n eH s eH H n
 H
 H
  H
=N0 H H eN0 E H H H H
 


 H 
H
+e2 Es H E H H eN0 E H H H
 

 H
H
+e2 N0 H E H H H H

 H
1
=N0 HH H
+ e2 Es H Nt INr H
 
1 H  H
H
+e2 N0 H E HH H


1   H 1
2
2
H
= N0 + e Nt Es + e N0 tr H H
H H

810

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 6, NO. 3, MARCH 2007

 H
 H 1

where
,
 H we used the factH that H H  = H H H
E ss  = Es INt , E nn
= N0 INr , E 
= Nt INr


1 H
1
= tr HH H
INr .
and E HH H

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