Capacity Analysis of MIMO Systems

Digital communication using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless links has recently emerged as one of the most significant technical breakthroughs in modern communications. This thesis presents an overview of some important theoretical concepts of MIMO systems. After describing the basic ideas of MIMO transmissions in the introduction, we mainly focused on information theoretical concepts and investigated the system capacity and the mutual information for finite symbol alphabets of some prominent MIMO ST designs. Furthermore, the error performance is studied, in order to derive a more complete understanding of MIMO system parameters. All analyses were performed under ideal identical independent fading conditions. At the end of this thesis, we related the system capacity and the error performance of MIMO systems to the framework of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Each chapter is rounded by a number of simulations to deepen the understanding of the derived theoretical concepts.