Abstract: We investigate the optimal transmitter design for the single-user multiple-input multiple-output(MIMO) communication system based on the knowledge of the correlation matrix of Rayleigh fading channels. The practical system with correlated receive and correlated transmit antennas is considered in this paper. Furthermore, we assume that the receiver has perfect channel state information, while the transmitter knows only the transmit correlation matrix and receive correlation matrix. The optimality pertains to minimizing an upper bound on the symbol error rate. The optimal transmit directions turn out to be the orthogonal directions along the eigenvectors of the transmit correlation matrix and independent of the receive correlation matrix. However the optimal power allocation scheme is related to both transmit and receive correlation matrix.

Key words: MIMO, channel correlation, correlation matrix, symbol error rate