IEEE 802.11n: Performance evaluation of modified Viterbi metrics for TxBF, SDM and spatial spreading transceivers

In this paper, we complement the open literature by presenting a comparative performance evaluation between conventional and modified Viterbi metrics for soft-decision decoding of binary convolutional codes in the framework of IEEE 802.11n systems with transmit beamforming, space division multiplexing and spatial spreading transceiver architectures. Simulation results show that the inclusion of channel state information in the Viterbi metrics allows significant performance improvement in the packet error rate over spatially correlated frequency selective TGn channels.