Performance of Space-Time Block Coding-based system in an underground gold mine

Using space time block coding (STBC) to enhance the communication quality in underground environments may be of great interest. In this paper, by the aid of the simple maximum likelihood algorithm at the reception, the bit error rate performance of STBC scheme is investigated on a 2× 2 MIMO system within an underground gold mine environment. Taking Rayleigh channel as a reference, the performance in the specific indoor environment is compared to the SISO case when using BPSK and QPSK modulations.