Impact of receiver inter-chain coupling on BER performance of space-time coded MIMO systems

In multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems, multiple radio frequency (RF) chains are required at both transmit and receive side of the link, each corresponding to one antenna. Mutual coupling effects may occur not only at the antennas, but also among the RF chains integrated on a single chip. At the receive side, inter-chain coupling leads to a degradation of the receive signal power and a generation of correlated noise. The impact of these effects on bit error rate (BER) performance in space-time block coded MIMO systems is calculated analytically. Further on, design considerations are discussed