Performance Analysis of Space Time Coding

AbstractMost work on wireless communications had focused on having an antenna array at only one end of the wireless link — usually at the receiver. Seminal papers by Gerard J. Foschini and Michael J. Gans, Foschini and Emre Telatar enlarged the scope of wireless communication possibilities by showing that for the highly-scattering environment substantial capacity gains are enabled when antenna arrays are used at both ends of a link. An alternative approach to utilizing multiple antennas relies on having multiple transmit antennas and only optionally multiple receive antennas. Proposed by Vahid Tarokh, Nambi Seshadri and Robert Calderbank, these space–time codes(STCs) achieve significant error rate improvements over single-antenna systems. Their original scheme was based on trellis codes but the simpler block codes were utilised by Siavash Alamouti, and later Vahid Tarokh, Hamid Jafarkhani and Robert Calderbank to develop space–time block-codes (STBCs). STC involves the transmission of multiple redundant copies of data to compensate for fading and thermal noise in the hope that some of them may arrive at the receiver in a better state than others.