Performance Analysis of a Modified V-BLAST System With Delay Offsets Using Zero-Forcing Detection

This paper focuses on a modified Vertical-Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) system, where different delay offsets are intentionally applied to the spatially multiplexed data streams. The proposed system can use only one receive antenna to recover the transmitted information by zero forcing (ZF) detection, whereas the conventional synchronous V-BLAST system requires that M
_r
ges M
_t
(where M
_t
and M
_r
are the number of transmit and receive antennas, respectively). The exact closed-form expression of bit error rates (BERs) is derived for an M
_t
times M
_r
modified system with ZF strategy. Compared with the conventional synchronous V-BLAST system, the modified system can achieve M
_r
-th-order diversity using ZF detection; however, the increase in the diversity order comes at the cost of the multiplexing gain. Although delay offsets in the system introduce an attenuation factor that decreases the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio, the BER performance of the modified system with proper system parameters demonstrates a performance improvement over the conventional synchronous V-BLAST system.