MIMO-OFDM for wireless communications: signal detection with enhanced channel estimation

Multiple transmit and receive antennas can be used to form multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels to increase the capacity by a factor of the minimum number of transmit and receive antennas. In this paper, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for MIMO channels (MIMO-OFDM) is considered for wideband transmission to mitigate intersymbol interference and enhance system capacity. The MIMO-OFDM system uses two independent space-time codes for two sets of two transmit antennas. At the receiver, the independent space-time codes are decoded using prewhitening, followed by minimum-Euclidean-distance decoding based on successive interference cancellation. Computer simulation shows that for four-input and four-output systems transmitting data at 4 Mb/s over a 1.25 MHz channel, the required signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for 10% and 1% word error rates (WER) are 10.5 dB and 13.8 dB, respectively, when each codeword contains 500 information bits and the channel's Doppler frequency is 40 Hz (corresponding normalized frequency: 0.9%). Increasing the number of the receive antennas improves the system performance. When the number or receive antennas is increased from four to eight, the required SNRs for 10% and 1% WER are reduced to 4 dB and 6 dB, respectively. Therefore, MIMO-OFDM is a promising technique for highly spectrally efficient wideband transmission.