BER Performance of 802.11p in SISO, MISO, and MIMO Fading Channels

The aim of this article is to simulate bit error rate (BER) of the IEEE 802.11p standard with different numbers of transmit and receive antennas. Assuming a simple flat Rayleigh fading channel, we have investigated three different antenna settings, namely, single input single output (SISO), multiple input single output (MISO), and multiple input multiple output (MIMO). When multiple antennas are considered at the transmitter end (MISO/ MIMO), simultaneous transmission is realized through Alamouti’s space-time coding. For studying the effect of channel estimation on BER both the ideal case, i.e. perfect estimation, and the case when these estimators at receiver follow the least square (LS) algorithm, are examined. Effect of coding rate on the BER is also studied. Case specific simulation models are developed using MATLAB and results for all the different cases are compared. As expected, BER performance improved when more antennas are present at transmitter/ receiver or when the code rate is low. It was also found that the penalty of LS estimation can be compensated by lowering the code rate.