Performance sensitivity comparison of two diversity schemes

A recently proposed simple transmit diversity (STD) scheme was shown to have the same performance as the classical maximal-ratio combining (MRC) receiver under the assumption that the amplitude and phase of the Rayleigh faded channel are known exactly at the receiver. An analysis and comparison of the performance degradations of the STD scheme and MRC receiver due to errors in estimating the channel parameters are presented. It is shown that the bit error rate degradation for the STD scheme can be significantly worse than that of an MRC receiver