Effects of partial-band jamming on space-time coded systems

The use of multiple transmit antennas and multiple receive antennas provides the potential for high capacity communication links in multipath fading environments, but the sensitivity of multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) techniques to degradation by adversarial jamming must to be considered in military applications. In this paper we derive general equations for the ergodic capacity of MIMO links in the presence of arbitrary partial-band noise jamming. These formulas are then specialized to the case of uniform partial-band jamming, for which the ergodic capacity depends only on a small number of parameters (signal-to-noise ratio, jammer-to-noise ratio, and jammer occupancy). Results are presented from numerical studies in which the ergodic capacity is evaluated for parameter values representative of a wide range of operating conditions. These results provide interesting insights into the partial-band jammer's optimal strategy and show that space-time coded systems are robust to this type of intentional interference.