ABSTRACT
Besides the channel conditions, also the structure of the transmit signal of a MIMO system has a strong impact on the achievable capacity and performance. Basically, the proposed schemes can be split in two groups: Space Time Coding (STC) and no STC. STC increases the robustness/ performance of the communication system by coding over the different transmitter branches, while SDM achieves a higher data rate by transmitting independent data streams on the different transmitter branches simultaneously and at the same carrier frequency on flat-fading rayleigh channels. The capacity of MIMO channels is determined and a Bit/ Symbol Error Rate (B/SER) lower bound is formulated based on the capacity, the relation between the SER and BER for MIMO is defined. Furthermore, an error- rate performance analysis is performed for ZF with soft and Hard decoding.
Furthermore, the successive interference cancellation in combination with soft decoding significantly outperforms regular SER than hard decoding and when comparing the performance between BPSK and 16-QAM for a flat Rayleigh fading channel, the shift strongly depends on the applied SDM technique.
Finally, Alamouti scheme is optimal, in the sense that it is capable of attaining the system’s Shannon capacity.
