Switched-mode BLAST technique for MIMO communications

MIMO Space-Time Coding (STC) could enhance the data rate or improve the BER by adding diversity in the presence of a channel fading. The V-BLAST and D-BLAST techniques are designed to improve the data rate. The performance of these techniques is highly dependent on the MIMO channel environment. The high SNR environment with spatially uncorrelated fading is well conditioned to V-BLAST. While, the low SNR or the fading is spatially correlated, is conditioned for the D-BLAST. This paper proposes a switched layered space-time (LST) technique, namely; switched-mode BLAST (SM-BLAST). The simulation results show that the proposed technique is to be able to adapt to a wide range of MIMO channel environments, providing a compromise performance improvement over the conventional non-adaptive BLAST techniques.