Accurate BER analysis of square OSTBCs with imperfect channel estimation in arbitrarily correlated Rayleigh fading

In this contribution, we present a novel closed-form approximation of the bit error rate (BER) for square orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) under arbitrarily correlated Rayleigh fading with imperfect channel estimation. Although derived for a mismatched maximum-likelihood receiver that obtains the channel state information through pilot-based linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) channel estimation, the presented expression is shown to yield very accurate BER results for both LMMSE and least-squares channel estimation, over a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios. The information symbols are assumed to belong to a pulse amplitude modulation or square quadrature amplitude modulation constellation.