  Outage and error rate performance of the ordered BLAST with more than 2
transmit antennas is evaluated for i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels. A number of
lower and upper bounds on the 1st step outage probability at any SNR are
derived, which are further used to obtain accurate approximations to average
block and total error rates. For m Tx antennas, the effect of the optimal
ordering at the first step is an m-fold SNR gain. As m increases to infinity,
the BLER decreases to zero, which is a manifestation of the space-time
autocoding effect in the V-BLAST. While the sub-optimal ordering (based on the
before-projection SNR) suffers a few dB SNR penalty compared to the optimal
one, it has a lower computational complexity and a 3 dB SNR gain compared to
the unordered V-BLAST and can be an attractive solution for
low-complexity/low-energy systems. Uncoded D-BLAST exhibits the same outage and
error rate performance as that of the V-BLAST. An SNR penalty of the linear
receiver interfaces compared to the BLAST is also evaluated.
