Maximum Likelihood Detection in MIMO Communication Systems in Presence of Channel Estimation Error

Capacity of wireless communication systems can be increased significantly by using arrays of antenna at the transmitter and receiver. In these so called multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems, the algorithms used for detection of transmitted symbols are based on perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver side. The optimum detection approach in the sense of symbol error rate (SER) is Maximum likelihood (ML) detector. However, in the case of imperfect channel knowledge, the performance of this type of detection method degrades and symbol error rate (SER) increases. In this manuscript, we have briefly addressed the effect of imperfect channel knowledge on the performance of MIMO communication systems. Then, an analytical approach is proposed to cope with the destructive effect of CSI uncertainty on the ML detection algorithm and the performance of our proposed method is verified via computer simulations.