Transmit power allocation for a modified V-BLAST system

In this letter, we present a modification of Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST), and propose an effective transmit power allocation (TPA) scheme for the modified system. The proposed TPA scheme minimizes the uncoded bit-error rate (BER) averaged over all detection stages, and requires small feedback overhead. Simulation results show that the modified V-BLAST system with the proposed TPA scheme provides a significant reduction in the uncoded BER compared with the conventional V-BLAST system. When the minimum mean-square error nulling is adopted, the modified V-BLAST system is found to achieve the uncoded BER performance comparable to that of the maximum-likelihood detection for the conventional V-BLAST architecture.