Investigation of the channel estimation error on MIMO system performance

Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) wireless communication systems provide large capacity allowing high data rates transmission. However, this huge increase of the capacity requires perfect channel knowledge at the receiver. In this paper, we analyze the effect of imperfect channel knowledge on the achievable rates. More precisely, we express a lower bound on the capacity as a function of the channel Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). In previous works, we made the calculation and comparison of CRB for different channel estimation schemes. This allows us to make comparison of channel achievable rates for different context under various data and pilot design assumptions.