Minimum bit error rate beamforming receiver for space-division multiple-access based quadrature amplitude modulation systems

We considers the beamforming assisted multiple-antenna receiver for space-division multiple-access based multiuser systems that employ high-throughput quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signalling. The bit error ratio (BER) expression as the function of the beamformer's weight vector is derived, and the minimum BER (MBER) beamforming receiver is then obtained as the solution of the resulting optimisation problem that minimises the MBER criterion. A simplified conjugate gradient algorithm, which has previously demonstrated its effectiveness in solving the minimum symbol error ratio (MSER) optimisation problem, is employed to solve this MBER optimisation. For high-order QAM, although the bit decision is an inherently more complicated procedure than making a symbol decision, it turns out that the computational complexity of computing the MBER solution is similar to that of computing the MSER solution. As expected, our simulation results show that both the MBER and MSER systems achieve the same BER performance, and they significantly outperform the standard minimum mean squares error based solution.