  Hardware impairments in radio-frequency components of a wireless system cause
unavoidable distortions to transmission that are not captured by the
conventional linear channel model. In this paper, a 'binoisy' single-user
multiple-input multiple-output (SU-MIMO) relation is considered where the
additional distortions are modeled via an additive noise term at the transmit
side. Through this extended SU-MIMO channel model, the effects of transceiver
hardware impairments on the achievable rate of multi-antenna point-to-point
systems are studied. Channel input distributions encompassing practical
discrete modulation schemes, such as, QAM and PSK, as well as Gaussian
signaling are covered. In addition, the impact of mismatched detection and
decoding when the receiver has insufficient information about the
non-idealities is investigated. The numerical results show that for realistic
system parameters, the effects of transmit-side noise and mismatched decoding
become significant only at high modulation orders.
