In MIMO systems, a transmitter sends multiple streams by multiple transmit antennas. The transmit streams go through a matrix channel which consists of multiple paths between multiple transmit antennas at the transmitter and multiple receive antennas at the receiver. Then, the receiver gets the received signal vectors by the multiple receive antennas and decodes the received signal vectors into the original information. Here is a MIMO system model:
where and are the receive and transmit vectors, respectively. In addition, and are the channel matrix and the noise vector, respectively.