Achievable Performance of Orthogonal STBC Over Spatially Correlated Rician Channels

The effect of spatial correlation on the performance of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) over multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) Rician fading channels is studied. Asymptotic error-rate formulas for OSTBC with high average signal-to-noise ratios (ASNRs) over arbitrarily correlated Rician MIMO channels are derived in terms of the diversity and coding gains. Our results show that, in correlated fading, the phase vector phi of the channel line-of-sight (LOS) components affects the effective Rice K-factor at the OSTBC receiver output and, hence, may result in a coding gain that is significantly higher than that for independent Rician MIMO channels. Furthermore, when the channel covariance matrix is rank deficient and under some additional mild conditions, the error and outage probabilities of OSTBC achieve those in a nonfading additive-white-Gaussian-noise channel. For both cases of full-rank and rank-deficient channel covariance matrices, analytical expressions of optimal and worst case phase vectors phi, and exact upper and lower bounds of OSTBC performance are derived. These results provide new insights into the achievable performance of OSTBC over correlated Rician MIMO channels and, if incorporated into future multiple antenna systems design, will bring about significant performance enhancement