Array mutual coupling effect on the adaptive space-time transmit schemes

The combination of adaptive beamforming (ABF) with space-time block coding (STBC) has been widely studied in wireless communications. However, all of the existing schemes ignore the effect of mutual coupling (MC) between array elements. In this paper, an adaptive space-time transmit scheme is firstly introduced using the maximization of the output mean SNR and the minimization of the symbol error rate (SER) upper bound as the design criteria. Next, an appropriate array MC model is developed. Then, based on the Laplace transform, closed-form expressions for the SERs of the system with the transmit scheme are derived, so that the effect of array mutual coupling can be analyzed by considering the three most widely used modulations. Finally, computer simulations and corresponding conclusions are given at the end of this paper.