Multi‐user uplink transmission with asymptotic full‐receiver‐diversity in massive MIMO systems

Abstract A scenario of uplink transmissions from multiple single‐antenna users to a base‐station with large number of antennas is considered in this letter. Based on the conditional statistic properties of the received signals, a maximum likelihood‐based detector without prior channel state information is firstly presented. In order to estimate the whole transmitted symbols successfully, the optimal signal design can be equivalently converted to a max–min problem based on the conditional covariance matrix of the received signals. From the asymptotic performance analyses with the lower and upper bounds of the pairwise error probability, we show that the pairwise error probability decays exponentially with the number of receiver's antennas, which we define as the asymptotic full‐receiver‐diversity order in non‐coherent massive MIMO systems. In addition, we present the numerical results and illustrate the comparisons with several non‐coherent transmission schemes in the state‐of‐the‐art to verify the performance of our proposed scheme.