Closed-form approximation for the outage capacity of orthogonal STBC

In this letter we derive a tight analytical approximation for the outage capacity of orthogonal space-time block codes (STBC's). The proposed expression is a simple closed-form function of the power covariance matrix of the channel. In the case of uncorrelated channels, the expression only depends on the variances of the channel power gains that can be expressed analytically for the most common fading distributions: Rayleigh, Rice, Nakagami, Weibull, etc. Furthermore, the approximation encompasses different fading distributions and gains between different pairs of transmit and receive antennas, which can occur in distributed STBC networks.