Outage Probability Analysis of a Multi-User MIMO Wireless Communication System with Space-Time Block Coding

A multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with orthogonal space-time block coding (OSTBC) is analyzed in a Rayleigh fading environment for the uplink of a wireless communication system. The outage probability of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) for the user of interest is evaluated by using the following linear receivers; 1) a sub-optimum matched filter (MF) and 2) an optimum minimum variance (MV) receiver. Simulation results show that for an outage probability of 0.2, the MV receiver provides a gain of about 3 dB over the MF in terms of the SINR threshold value when a full-rate OSTBC like the Alamouti code is used. However, for low-rate OSTBCs like a 1/2-rate 8times3 OSTBC, the difference of this gain between the MF and the MV receiver is above 8 dB