Asymptotic Performance Analysis of MMSE Receivers in Multicell MU-MIMO Systems

For large-scale antenna array multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a typical solution often put forward for uplink detection consists in applying low-complexity linear receivers such as zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) combiners. In this paper, the performance of uplink MMSE detection has been analyzed in the context of a multi-cell multiuser MIMO system. An approximate expression for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is proposed, which is in simple form and becomes exact in the low SNR regime. This approximate SINR applies to systems where the base station (BS) has the statistical information of the out-of-cell interfering signals, and systems where the BS ignores the presence of such interfering signals. This approximate SINR is tight for arbitrary user powers, arbitrary number of antennas at the base station, and arbitrary channel correlation matrix associated with any particular user. Approximate expressions for capacity and bit-error rate/symbol-error rate have also been derived. Particularly, it can be proven that, when the MMSE receiver ignores the presence of out-of-cell interfering signals, the performance gap between ZF and MMSE vanishes in the high SNR regime.