Performance of Reed-Solomon coded beamforming in MIMO Rayleigh fading channels

In this paper, we study Reed-Solomon (RS) coded beamforming in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fading channels. To combat the fading, we introduce a block interleaver into RS-coded beamforming systems and we present the performance analysis of such systems. We show that the interleaver can greatly improve the performance of RS coded beamforming systems, especially in the systems with a small number of antennas. We also observe that the interleaver gain in a RS coded beamforming system vanishes as the number of antennas increases. We illustrate that the proposed approach has potential to evaluate the tradeoffs between spatial diversity and time diversity via symbol interleaving.