SINR-distribution after MIMO detection
Signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio is an important performance measure, which is defined as
SINR=PI+N
where P is the power of signal of interest, I is the interference power, and N is the noise power.
With a linear MIMO receiver, e.g., ZF and MMSE, the estimated symbol can be written as
y=Ds+Zs+Wn
where D is a diagonal matrix, Z is a matrix which contains interferences between data streams and Wn is the filtered noise. Thus, the signal power, the interference power and the noise power can be obtained by
P=E[‖Ds‖2]
I=E[‖Zs‖2]
N=E[‖Wn‖2]
The post-processing SINR can be expressed as
SINR=E(‖Ds‖2)Es⋅trace(ZZH)+σ2n⋅trace(WWH)
For a ZF detector, due to Z=0 and D=I, the formula can be expressed as
SINRZF=1σ2n⋅trace(WZFWHZF)=1MSEZF
For a MMSE detector, assuming that Es=1, the expression can be represented as
SINRMMSE=trace(DDH)trace(ZZH)+σ2n⋅trace(WMMSEWHMMSE)
For SIC methods, similar to ZF/MMSE, but the effect of error propagation has to be additionally addressed.