Performance of space-time spreading with correlated fading and channel estimation

Space-time block codes (STBC) have been proposed as a less complex alternative to space-time trellis codes for achieving transmit diversity. Application of such STBCs to code division multiple access (CDMA) systems is called space-time spreading (STS). STS schemes have been considered under the assumption of independent transmit fades and ideal channel state information (CSI). However, the performance of these schemes deteriorates when the above assumptions are relaxed in a realistic system. We study analytically the performance degradation due to both the fade correlation and the channel estimation errors.