Performance analysis of space-time coding schemes for the correlated Rayleigh fading channel

In this paper, the performance of a space-time channel coding scheme is discussed in a Rayleigh fading channel with correlated fading amplitudes and an additive white Gaussian noise. A closed formula on the bit error rate is obtained by the introduction of a new method, which is based on a Karhunen-Loeve transform. The correlated fading amplitudes vector is mapped to an uncorrelated one by the Karhunen-Loeve transform. So we generalize the well-known analytical expressions for the bit error probability of the uncorrelated Rayleigh channel to the case of correlated fading one. Meanwhile, the bit error probability we obtained can be expressed by an integral over a finite interval, which can be easily evaluated numerically. Numerical result shows the correlation among the transmission path decreases the performance of the system.