Performance bounds of space-time block coding in Rician and log-normal fading channels

Abstract

Analytical expressions concerning the capacity and bit error rate (BER) of multiple-input multiple-output systems with space-time block coding (STBC) are derived. Two fading environments are examined, log-normal and Rician channels. A tight closed-form upper bound is presented for the BER of systems operating in log-normal fading environments in addition to an upper bound for the capacity of this type of systems. The latter bound applies to systems that operate under Rician fading as well. The analytical results were validated against ample numerical simulations for three STBC schemes and three phase-shift-keying modulations. The proposed bounds proved to be a tractable way to evaluate the system performance when no closed-form expression for the probability density function or the moment generating function is known.