Impact of the channel estimation error on the array processing based decoder for QO-STBC

An array processing based decoder for the quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (QO-STBC) has been analyzed in our former work. It is investigated in terms of complexity and symbol error ratio (SER) under the assumption that perfect channel state information (CSI) is known to the receiver. As in wireless communication scenarios, it is prohibitive to get the perfect knowledge of channel. So it is worth to investigate how the array processing based decoder will be effected by imperfect CSI. In this work, the impact caused by channel estimation error on the performance of the QO-STBC is evaluated. Based on the analysis and simulation results, we can see that the channel estimation error does degrade the SER performance a lot in high signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime. Mean square error (MSE) is employed to measure how the degradation depends on the correctness of the estimator. To make this method applicable, channel estimators should be probably chosen.