Error rate analysis of space time coded MIMO-OFDM wireless communication system

Abstract

Today's enormously growing users and applications in the wireless network are demanding high speed, high throughput, and reliable wireless links. The capacity or throughput can be improved using multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver or using spatial multiplexing as a result of the MIMO system. In the wireless environment, multipath fading is a big issue that harms signal quality and reliable communication over the wireless link. The merger of MIMO and OFDM schemes offers a better solution for mitigating error rates for reliable communication and better throughput. The ‘space-time codes (STC)’ can be used with the MIMO-OFDM system that provides transmit and receive diversity to improve the capacity as well as error rate performance. In this article, Alamouti STBC and the ‘maximal-ratio-combining (MRC)’ methods are proposed for the analysis of ‘Bit error rates (BER)’ under Rayleigh fading channel. It is shown through the results that Alamouti STBC and MRC schemes are better solutions for mitigating BER in wireless communication to improve signal quality. Simulation results shows that the MRC scheme with (1× 2) and (1 × 4) antenna configurations outperforms the Alamouti scheme with (2 × 1) antenna configuration by the SNR gain of 3 dB and 10 dB respectively at the BER value of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−3</sup> .