Understanding the BER-performance of space-time block codes

Author

Gritsch, Gerhard ; Weinrichter, H. ; Rupp, Markus

Author_Institution

Inst. of Commun. & Radio Frequency Eng., Vienna Univ. of Technol., Austria

fYear

2003

fDate

15-18 June 2003

Firstpage

31

Lastpage

35

Abstract

We show that, in the case of general space-time block codes (STBC), not only the pairwise error probabilities (PEPs) between nearest neighboring code words have to be considered to evaluate the total bit error ratio (BER) performance of the STBC. It turns out that code word pairs differing in a rather large large number of positions typically lead to rank deficient distance matrices (DMs), causing a severe diversity loss and thus deterioration in the total BER performance in Rayleigh fading wireless multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) channels, especially at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels. In the special case of orthogonal codes from the generalized complex orthogonal design (GCOD), nearest neighbor code word errors dominate the BER-curve and no diversity loss occurs at high SNR.

Keywords

MIMO systems; Rayleigh channels; block codes; error statistics; matrix algebra; space-time codes; BER-performance; MIMO channels; Rayleigh fading channels; SNR; STBC; bit error ratio; code word pairs; diversity loss; generalized complex orthogonal design; multiple input-multiple output channels; nearest neighbor code word errors; orthogonal codes; pairwise error probabilities; rank deficient distance matrices; signal-to-noise ratio; space-time block codes; space-time codes; Bit error rate; Block codes; Communications technology; MIMO; Nearest neighbor searches; Radio frequency; Rayleigh channels; Signal to noise ratio; Space technology; Upper bound;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications, 2003. SPAWC 2003. 4th IEEE Workshop on

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7858-X

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SPAWC.2003.1318916

Filename

1318916