Robustness of space-time codes in the presence of channel estimation errors in OFDM systems

Many space-time codes (STC) have been proposed to enhance the performance of wireless communications in flat fading channels. All of them rely on the knowledge of the channel, and are hence affected by the channel estimation errors. In this paper, we investigate STC robustness under imperfect channel knowledge. We first define the concept of "closeness" by comparing the BER under channel estimation errors with that under perfect channel knowledge, aiming to characterize STC performance degradation due to imperfect channel knowledge. Then the robustness of STC can be compared by their "closeness" to perfect results. We find that for systems with two and three transmit antennas, the space time block codes (STBC) are always more robust to channel estimation errors than space time trellis codes (STTC). With the increase of receive diversity, all STC become more robust to the channel estimation errors. For STTC, as the number of trellis states increases, the codes become less robust to the channel estimation errors. We also compare the BER performance of STC in the presence of channel estimation errors. For the two-transmit-antenna system, the performance of STBC is always better than that of the 4-state STTC, but is always worse than 16-state STTC. For systems with three transmit antennas, the BER performance of STTC is much better than that of STBC.