International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)

Volume 63 No.14, February 2013

Performance Analysis of MIMO Systems over

AWGN Channel with Antenna Selection using
Zero Forcing Receivers
Navjot Kaur

Lavish Kansal

Lovely Professional University

Phagwara, India

Lovely Professional University

Phagwara, India

ABSTRACT
High data rates within the limited radio frequency (RF)
spectrum is always desirable that leads to radios with
capabilities beyond a single-input single-output (SISO)
topology. Recently introduced wireless systems have adopted
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) topologies that use
two or more transmitters and two or more receivers to send
data simultaneously over the same RF bandwidth. The
performance of MIMO system can be improved by using
multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver so as to provide
spatial diversity. In this paper, the performance analysis of
MIMO system over AWGN fading channel with ZF receiver
is presented. The effects of the antenna selection can also be
analyzed from the simulated results. The BER (Bit Error Rate)
performance characteristics of Zero-Forcing (ZF) receiver is
investigated for M-PSK modulation technique over the
AWGN channel.

a single frequency band. In general, having multiple antennas

offers three potential use cases: diversity, beam forming, and
space division multiplexing (SDM). MIMO systems are
implemented to obtain a diversity gain to combat signal
fading.
An efficient implementation of space-time block coding
(STBC) for broadband wireless communications improves
the
performance
and
diversity
gains
of
a
space time (ST) coding system through a number of
parameters including type of trellis codes and channel
fading[3][4]. The two main functions of STC: diversity &
multiplexing. The maximum performance needs tradeoffs
between diversity and multiplexing. V-BLAST is a system in
which full spatial diversity is usually not achieved [5].

Keywords MIMO, AWGN, spatial diversity, BER, ZF,

M-PSK, SNR, multi-path fading, STBC.

1. INTRODUCTION
Multiple antennas employed at transmitter and receiver sides
are used in wireless communication so as to achieve the high
data rates through spatial multiplexing [1]. MIMO involves
multiple transmitters sending unique data content to multiple
receivers using spatial multiplexing. MIMO does increase
data rates and requires better SNR than an equivalent SISO
transmission. This method offers higher capacity to wireless
systems and the capacity increases linearly with the number of
antennas.

The block diagram of MIMO system is shown in the Fig. 1.1.

The basic main idea of MIMO is to improve BER or data rate
(bits/sec) by using multiple TX/RX antennas. [6]. For
achieving high data rate or improved BER, the core scheme
used in MIMO system is space-time coding (STC).

Future trends of wireless communications mentioned below

leads to MIMO development: Future wireless applications create insatiability as demand
for high data rate and high link quality wireless access
has increased a lot.
Spectrum has become a scarce and expensive resource as
bandwidth is very limited
Regulation, device and system capacity concerns as
transmit power is limited
Time and frequency domain processing are at limits, but
space is not!

MIMO provides higher capacity (bits/s/Hz), better

transmission quality (BER), increased coverage and improved
user position estimation due to the following factors:
Spatial multiplexing gain : Capacity gain at no additional
power or bandwidth consumption obtained through the use of
multiple antennas at both sides of a wireless radio link
Diversity gain : Improvement in link reliability obtained
by transmitting the same data on independently fading
branches
Array gain
Interference reduction

A MIMO system utilizes spatial diversity by using spatially

separated antennas in a dense multipath scattering
environment [2]. In MIMO, phased sets of antennas take
advantage of the differences in the spatial propagation paths
to improve signal robustness or to send multiple data sets over

In this paper, the effects of AWGN channel are considered on

the performance of MIMO systems with different antenna
selection using ZF receivers. AWGN channel is a universal
channel which adds a white Gaussian noise to the signal

Fig. 1.1: Block Diagram of 2X2 MIMO System

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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)

Volume 63 No.14, February 2013
passing through it. It is a channel model used for analyzing
the various modulation schemes.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) communication
systems employing coding techniques appropriate to multiple
antenna transmissions have recently been embraced as an
effective means to achieve high data rate over wireless
channels.
A. I. Sulyman [7] describes the impact of antenna selection on
the performance of multiple input-multiple output (MIMO)
systems over nonlinear communication channels. The author
has derived exact analytical expressions for evaluating the
PWEP performance of space-time trellis codes over nonlinear
MIMO channel.
C. Wang [8] explains the approach to increase the capacity of
MIMO systems by employing the 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 it also offers significant
computational complexity reduction with
tolerable
performance degradation.
The comparison of MIMO with SISO technology was
discussed by S. G. Kim et. al [9]. MIMO can not only
improve spectral efficiency, but also enhance link throughput
or capacity of the system. The authors presented a tight closed
form BER approximation of MPSK for MIMO ZF receiver
over continuous flat fading channels. The larger the difference
between the number of transmit antennas and the number of
receive antennas is, the better performance is.

Equalizer and Minimum Mean Square Equalizers. Based on

the mathematical modeling and the simulation result it is
inferred that the ML equalizer is the best of the three
equalizers.

3. MODULATION TECHNIQUE
The digital communication system consists of two
fundamentals components i.e. modulation and encoder.
Modulation is the process of mapping the digital information
to analog form so it can be transmitted over a long distance
via channel. Modulator is a device used in transmitter side to
perform modulation and demodulation is done at the receiver
end by making use of demodulator. Demodulation is the
inverse process of modulation so as to recover the transmitted
digital information.
Phase-shift keying (M-PSK) for which the signal set is:
(1.1)
where Es the signal energy per symbol Ts is the symbol
duration and fc is the carrier frequency.
This phase of the carrier takes on one of the M possible
values.
(1.2)
M-ary PSK modulation yields a circular constellation as
shown in Fig. 1.2. The main constraint was to keep the
amplitude of the transmitted signals be constant.

A simple two-branch transmit diversity scheme was presented

by S. Alamouti [10]. The scheme uses two transmit antennas
and one receive antenna. It provides the same diversity order
as maximal-ratio receiver combining (MRRC) with one
transmit antenna, and two receive antennas.
V. Tarokh et.al [11] design a channel codes for improving the
high data rate and the reliability of communications over
fading channels using multiple transmit antennas. Data is
encoded by a channel code and the encoded data is split into
multiple streams that are simultaneously transmitted using
multiple transmit antennas. The received signal at each
receive antenna is a linear superposition of the multiple
transmitted signals perturbed by noise.
The performance analysis of the low-cost and effective
transmission strategy that employs the simple spatial
multiplexing at the transmitter and zero-forcing processing at
the receiver in multiuser MIMO scheduling systems was
discussed by C. Chen [12].
N. S. Kumar et. al [13], investigated about the three types of
equalizer for MIMO wireless receivers. The authors discussed
about a fixed antenna MIMO antenna configuration and
compare the performance with all the three types of equalizer
based receiver namely ZF, ML, and MMSE. BER
performance of ML Equalizer is superior than zero forcing

Fig. 1.2: Signal Constellation Diagram for 4-PSK

4. AWGN CHANNEL
AWGN channel is a channel that adds a white Gaussian noise
to the signal passing through it. This implies that the
channels amplitude frequency response is flat (thus with
unlimited or infinite bandwidth) and phase frequency
response is linear for all frequencies so that modulated signals
pass through it without any amplitude loss and phase
distortion of frequency components. Fading does not exist.
The only distortion is introduced by the AWGN.
The received signal is simplified to
(1.3)
where n(t) is the additive white Gaussian noise.
The whiteness of n(t) implies that it is a stationary random
process with a flat power spectral density (PSD) for all
frequencies. It is a convention to assume its PSD as

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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)

Volume 63 No.14, February 2013

(1.4)

6. ZERO FORCING EQUALIZER

This implies that a white process has infinite power. This of

course is a mathematical idealization. According to the
Wiener-Khinchine theorem, the autocorrelation function of
the AWGN is
(1.5)
where ( ) is the Dirac delta function.

5. MIMO SYSTEM MODEL

Zero Forcing Equalizer is a linear equalization algorithm

which inverts the frequency response of the channel used in
communication systems.
The Zero-Forcing Equalizer applies the inverse of the channel
to the received signal, to restore the signal before the channel.
The name Zero Forcing corresponds to bringing down the ISI
to zero in a noise free case. This will be useful when ISI is
significant compared to noise [8] [9].
For a channel with frequency response F(f) the zero forcing
equalizer C(f) is constructed such that C(f) = 1 / F(f). Thus the
combination of channel and equalizer gives a flat frequency
response and linear phase F(f)C(f) = 1. By using the linear
model the received vector can be represented as:
y

(1.8)

For a 2x2 MIMO channel, the channel is modeled as,

Fig. 1.3: The MIMO Channel

(1.9)
The 2X2 MIMO channel is represented in Fig. 1.3 with an
antenna array with 2 elements at the transmitter and an
antenna array with 2 elements at the receiver is considered.
The input-output notation of the MIMO system can now be
expressed
by
the
equation:
(1.6)
where
denotes convolution, s(t) is a nt X 1 vector
corresponding to the nt transmitted signals, y(t) is a nr X 1
vector corresponding to the nr and u(t) is the additive white
noise.

7. SIMULATED RESULTS
In this section, BER (Bit Error Rate) analysis of MIMO
system over AWGN channel using STBC code structure is
done for M-PSK Modulation techniques. The BER analysis of
MIMO system is done for M-PSK over AWGN fading
channel where M can be 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1024 for
different antenna configurations. Here receiving antennas
used are ranging from NR = 1 to NR = 4.
(A) M-PSK over AWGN Channel

The impulse response of the channel between the jth

transmitter element and the ith receiver element is denoted as
hij(,t). The MIMO channel can then be described by the nr X
nt H(,t) matrix:

SNR vs BER Plot of 32-PSK in AWGN Channel

10

No. of Rx
No. of Rx
No. of Rx
No. of Rx

=
=
=
=

1
2
3
4

-1

bit error rate

10

(1.7)

-2

10

The matrix elements are complex numbers that correspond to

the attenuation and phase shift that the wireless channel
introduces to the signal reaching the receiver with delay .
-3

10

10

15
20
signal to noise ratio

25

30

(a) 32-PSK

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International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 8887)

Volume 63 No.14, February 2013
SNR vs BER Plot of 64-PSK in AWGN Channel

SNR vs BER Plot of 512-PSK in AWGN Channel

10

10
No.
No.
No.
No.

of Rx
of Rx
of Rx
of Rx

=
=
=
=

1
2
3
4

No. of Rx
No. of Rx
No. of Rx
No. of Rx

-1

=
=
=
=

1
2
3
4

-1

10

bit error rate

bit error rate

10

-2

10

-2

10

-3

10

10

15
20
signal to noise ratio

25

-3

10

30

10

(b) 64-PSK

30
40
signal to noise ratio

50

60

(e) 512-PSK

SNR vs BER Plot of 128-PSK in AWGN Channel

20

10

SNR vs BER Plot of 1024-PSK in AWGN Channel

No.
No.
No.
No.

of Rx
of Rx
of Rx
of Rx

=
=
=
=

10

1
2
3
4

No.
No.
No.
No.

-1

10

of Rx
of Rx
of Rx
of Rx

=
=
=
=

1
2
3
4

-1

bit error rate

bit error rate

10

-2

-2

10

10

-3

10

-3

10

20

30
40
signal to noise ratio

50

60

10

10

20

30
40
signal to noise ratio

50

60

(f) 1024-PSK

(c) 128-PSK
SNR vs BER Plot of 256-PSK in AWGN Channel

Fig. 1.4: SNR vs BER plots for M-PSK over

AWGN channel

10

No.
No.
No.
No.

of Rx
of Rx
of Rx
of Rx

=
=
=
=

1
2
3
4

In Fig. 1.4 (a) (f), SNR vs. BER plots for M-PSK over
AWGN channel for MIMO system with different antenna
configurations have been presented. From the graphs, it can
be concluded that as the number of receiving antennas are
increasing in the MIMO system, the BER keeps on decreasing
due to space diversity. Thus the system provides better BER
performance over the AWGN fading channel.

-1

bit error rate

10

-2

10

-3

10

10

20

30
40
signal to noise ratio

50

60

(d) 256-PSK
8. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the performance analysis of MIMO system over
AWGN fading channel employing different antenna
configurations is presented. It can be depicted from the graphs
that the BER keeps on decreasing in MIMO system due to
space diversity as increasing the number of receiving
antennas. Here receiving antennas have been used ranging

from NR = 1 to NR = 4. Spatial diversity techniques are

employed to improve signal quality and coverage. The
multiple receivers or multiple transmitters reduce multipath
fading and enhance SNR. Thus the proposed system provides
better BER performance.

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Volume 63 No.14, February 2013

9. REFERENCES
[1] R. W. Heath, Multimode antenna selection for spatial
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[8] C. Wang, On the Performance of the MIMO ZeroForcing Receiver in the Presence of Channel Estimation
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[3] V. Tarokh, H. Jafarkhani & A. R. Calderbank, Space

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[10] S. Alamouti, A simple transmit diversity technique for

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[12] C. Chen, Performance Analysis of Scheduling in

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