On the Performance of the Golden Code in the Presence of Channel Estimation Error in Correlated MIMO Rayleigh Fading Channels

The Golden Code (GC) is a full-rate and full-diversity, space-time code for 2 x 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with non-vanishing minimum determinant. Thanks to its algebraic construction, the GC achieves diversity-multiplexing gain trade-off and preserves the mutual information. The zero-forcing (ZF) detection is one of the simplest detection techniques that has a low computational complexity and provides a suboptimal performance. The purpose of this work is to investigate the effect of channel estimation error on the performance of the MIMO-ZF receiver for golden coded systems in spatio-temporally correlated Rayleigh fading channels. An upper and a lower bounds of the error probability are delivered and compared to the Monte Carlo simulation results. We quantify the capacity reduction due to the channel estimation error and to the spatio-temporally correlation. A tight lower bound of the ergodic capacity is provided. Numerical results show an excellent agreement between analytic bounds and Monte Carlo simulation curves. Moreover, the performances of the GC, in terms of bit error rate (BER) and channel capacity, are compared with those of the Alamouti coding.