Performance of General STCs Over Spatially Correlated MIMO Single-Keyhole Channels

For multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh channels, it has been shown that transmitter correlations always degrade the performance of general space–time codes (STCs) in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In this correspondence, however, we show that when MIMO channels experience single-keyhole conditions, the effect of spatial correlations between transmission antennas is more sophisticated for general STCs: When
$M>N$
(i.e., the number of transmission antennas is greater than the number of receiving antennas), depending on how the correlation matrix
${\bf P}$
beamforms the codeword difference matrix
${\mmb \Delta}$
, the pairwise error probability performance of general STCs can be either degraded or improved in high-SNR regimes. We provide a new measure, which is based on the eigenvalues of
${\mmb \Delta}$
and the numbers of transmission and receiving antennas, to examine if there exist certain correlation matrices that can improve the performance of general STCs in high-SNR regimes. Previous studies on the effect of spatial correlations over single-keyhole channels only concentrated on orthogonal STCs, whereas our study here is for general STCs and can also be used to explain previous findings for orthogonal STCs. Simulations also show that the results are applicable with imperfect channel knowledge.