Linear Precoders for OSTBC Mimo Systems with Correlated Rayleigh Fading Channels Based on Convex Optimization

In this paper, we present a precoder design framework and a computationally simple precoding technique for OSTBC based MIMO wireless systems with both transmit and receive correlations for the case of Rayleigh fading. It is assumed that the correlation among receive antennas is independent of the correlation among transmit antennas (and vice versa). The transmit and receive correlation matrices are assumed to be available at the transmitter, while the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is unknown. The proposed precoder minimizes the upper bound on the symbol error rate (SER). Our main contribution consists of developing a convex formulation for originally non-convex problem of SER minimization for precoder design. Additionally, it can be shown that previously known solutions for some special cases of precoder design naturally follow from our more general results. Numerical simulations illustrate the improved performance of the proposed precoders in terms of the output SER.