Performance analysis of space-time codes in the presence of spatio-temporal correlation

We study the impact of spatio-temporal correlation on the performance of space-time codes. We present an upper bound on pairwise word error probability of space-time codes over flat-fading Rician channels. The bound, which has a closed form expression, can be used as the basis for a unified approach to analyze and design space-time codes over any flat, Rician or Rayleigh, block-fading channel. We also present an upper and a lower bound for the diversity of the code in the presence of channel correlation. Moreover, we address the effect of spatio-temporal correlation on the mean value and variance of the instantaneous channel capacity and describe its impact on the outage probability.