BER analysis using zero-forcing linear precoding scheme for massive MIMO under imperfect channel state information

In massive MIMO systems, inter-user interference has effect on the transmitted signals, so linear precoding techniques are employed for multiuser transmission channels to remove this inter-user interference. It is very complicated to design a suitable linear precoding technique having low computational complexity, which will give an excellent Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. In this paper, we analyse BER under imperfect Channel-State-Information (CSI) using Zero-Forcing (ZF) linear precoding scheme in the downlink, massive MIMO in Time-Division-Duplex (TDD) mode. We derive the closed-form expressions for BER that are obtained from the new expressions derived for Signal-Interference-Noise Ratio (SINR), and then analysis with different parameters using numerical and Monte Carlo simulated results is carried out in MATLAB under imperfect CSI. It was found that our theoretical analysis agrees well with the simulated results. In our analysis, BER was observed in most cases to be good when the number of Base Station (BS) antennas is large enough to accommodate the served users, but when the number of users grows up, the BER performance degrades depending on how many BS antennas are capable of handling the additional users. Also, increasing the downlink transmit power was found to improve the performance, but it is not an energy-efficient way for massive MIMO.