MIMO Systems in Random Uncorrelated, Correlated and Deterministic Radio Channels

The paper discusses the BER and spectral efficiency of different MIMO systems in random uncorrelated, correlated and deterministic environments, and more specifically uncorrelated and correlated Rayleigh and Ricean fading channels. It is known that the so-called MIMO eigenmode transmission assumes channel knowledge at the transmitter for pre-coding, whereas V-BLAST and STC do not assume the channel knowledge at the transmitter, instead they use it at the receiver for recovering the transmitted information. It is shown that for the same spectral efficiency, the BER performance of the MIMO eigenmode transmission outperforms MIMO systems like V-BLAST and STBC. In fully correlated random environment, transmitting through the largest eigenmode exploits the full transmitter-receiver array gain and diversity order, giving the maximal possible performance in terms of reducing the BER. In any of the scenarios, transmitting through the largest eigenmode gives better performance in terms of reducing the BER compared with STBC systems. Spatial multiplexing through the so-called eigensets (sets which consist of transmission modes with significant channel gain) outperforms systems like V-BLAST. In this context, adaptive modulation has been used to minimize the overall BER for a given spectral efficiency.