Channel estimation for MIMO-OFDM systems

Channel estimation is a very important process in the operation of MIMO-OFDM systems, as it is vital for accurately estimating the Channel Impulse Response (CIR) of the channel under various conditions. As such, it is useful to have a Matlab®/ Simulink to model the behavior of the channel estimation process in a MIMO-OFDM system, in order to study the error rate of the system under different modulation and SNR conditions. As one of the most common transmitter diversity schemes used in MIMO-OFDM systems is Alamouti´s Space Time Block Code (STBC), a Simulink model is developed for performing channel estimation, assuming that the STBC is used. The model will then generate graphs of error rates vs SNR for different modulation schemes. The results show great improvement in Bit Error Rate (BER) by utilizing a Reed-Solomon Forward Error Correction code (RS-FEC) method.