Performance degradation of a transmit diversity scheme due to fading

In this paper, the error performance of the Alamouti simple transmit diversity (STD) scheme in the presence of spatially correlated fading with time-selectivity or channel estimation error is studied. Exact expressions for the conditional bit error rates and simple approximate expressions for the average bit error rates over correlated Rayleigh fading channels are obtained. It is shown that STD performance generally degrades with increase in channel estimation error, decrease in temporal correlation and increase in spatial correlation.