Performance comparison of MIMO-OFDM transmission schemes in the presence of I/Q imbalance and phase noise with application to IEEE 802.11N

In this paper, the bit error rate performances of multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing transmission schemes for two and four transmit antennas are studied and compared in the presence of phase noise, I/Q imbalance and channel estimation errors. It is shown that for matched rates and same decoding complexity, maximum diversity schemes such as the Alamouti code, perform better than the maximum capacity schemes such as spatial multiplexing. The simulation environment comply with IEEE 802.11n standard.