Performance Analysis of High Data Rate MIMO Systems in Frequency-Selective Fading Channels

The performance of multicode direct-sequence spread-spectrum multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in the presence of frequency-selective fading is evaluated. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the multiple-antenna interference when the processing gain is sufficiently large. The probability of error is derived for the conventional RAKE receiver, and its performance is compared for various system configurations. We consider system tradeoffs for both fixed rate and fixed diversity. For a fixed total data rate, we demonstrate the advantage of decreasing the number of transmit antennas while increasing the number of codes, and for a fixed total diversity order, we demonstrate the advantage of decreasing the number of RAKE taps while increasing the number of receive antennas.