Trade-Off Investigation Between Diversity and Spatial Multiplexing in Practical Systems Using Numerical Results

Using multiple antennas in wireless communication systems proposes some degrees of freedom in system design, these degrees of freedom can be applied to improve the system reliability by using space time block coding (STBC) which provides diversity gain. Degrees of freedom also can be applied to increase the system capacity using spatial multiplexing (SM) methods. It is possible to achieve a trade-off between diversity gain and spatial multiplexing gain. Selecting the method which provides best efficiency for a specific system is an important issue. In this paper we will show which space-time architecture achieves the best efficiency for a specific system in practical cases. This classification depends on the desired data rate, number of transmission antennas, modulation order, SNR regime and channel state.