Diversity and outage performance in space-time block coded Ricean MIMO channels

R.U. Nabar, H. Bolcskei, A.J. Paulraj
2005 IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications  
The goal of this paper is to assess the impact of real-world propagation conditions on the maximum achievable diversity performance of communication over MIMO channels. This will be done by studying the behavior of the single-input single-output (SISO) channel induced by the use of Orthogonal Space-Time Block Codes (OSTBCs). The performance criteria employed are symbol error rate, outage capacity, and wideband spectral efficiency. For general propagation conditions, we provide analytical
more » ... ions for each of these performance criteria, and establish key quantities which determine performance irrespective of the performance criterion used. Furthermore, we discuss the relation between the notion of diversity order related to the slope of the average error probability vs. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) curve, and diversity order related to the slope of the outage probability vs. SNR curve. For Ricean fading MIMO channels we demonstrate the existence of an SNR-dependent critical rate, R crit , below which signaling with zero outage is possible, and hence the fading channel behaves as an AWGN channel. For fading SISO channels, R crit is always zero. In the MIMO case, R crit is a simple function of the angle between the vectorized Ricean component of the channel and the subspace spanned by the vectorized Rayleigh fading component.
doi:10.1109/twc.2005.853835 fatcat:db432jj6x5hfvbw7a7neecsubu