Performance of MIMO Space-Time Coded Wireless Communication Systems

Recently there has been increasing interest in providing high quality and efficient broadband services over wireless and mobile links. Space-time codes (STC) are designed to exploit Multi-input and Multi-output (MIMO) antenna systems and by doing so, an enormous increase in the capacity of wireless systems can be achieved. STC can be viewed as combined coding and modulation scheme for Multi-input and Multi-output (MIMO) channels. Using an efficient way to allocate different symbols to different antennas, while adding coding redundancy, the code can achieve full antenna diversity and good coding gain. The paper presents space-time codes for MIMO wireless communications. Space-time codes employ redundancy to minimize the effects of fading, noise and interference. In a space-time block code, transmission of the signal takes place in blocks. Although, the Alamouti code does not perform as well as the same space-time trellis code, it is most preferred choice due to its computational, simplicity and satisfactory performance. The computer simulation compares the bit error rate (BER) performance of coherent binary PSK over an uncorrelated Rayleigh-fading channel for three different schemes.