Error Rate Performance Investigations of MIMO Transmission Modes through Nakagami-m Fading Channels

Abstract

In the field of wireless communication systems, the use of multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver side has gained a huge popularity over the past few decades, due to its tremendous performance enhancing capabilities. Such systems are known as MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) systems and can be classified into three main categories; Spatial Multiplexing, Spatial Diversity and Beam forming techniques. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the error rate performance of MIMO transmission modes through Nakagami-m fading channels. The ZF (Zero Forcing), MMSE (Minimum Mean-Square-Error) channel equalization algorithm; STTC (Space Time Trellis Codes), OSTBC (Orthogonal Space Time Block Codes), MRC (Maximal Ratio Combining) and Beamforming methods are analyzed. The QPSK modulation technique is used to evaluate the bit error rate (BER) performances under different SNR scenarios. The results described in this paper suggest considerable improvement in the system performance by incorporating different MIMO techniques in order to improve the wireless transmission link quality. Keywords: