Exploring Spatial Diversity Techniques for Future Broadband Multicarrier Mobile Radio Systems

In this paper, we investigate broadband OFDM systems which apply beamforming in combination with different space–time diversity techniques. Various beamforming scenarios with transmitter and/or receiver sided beamforming are considered. Space–time diversity is obtained by cyclic delay diversity (CDD) in order to artificially shape the spectrum of the received signal. Thus, an advantageous distribution of the errors before a Viterbi channel decoder is obtained. Simulation results for the bit error rate performance are presented and compared for OFDM systems applying different beamforming scenarios and CDD in a Rayleigh fading channel. Maximum ratio combining (MRC) of the signals received on multiple beams/antennas and inter-carrierinterference (ICI) is also taken into account in the performance analysis.