Space-time block codes over frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels

This paper proposes the combination of space-time block codes (ST-BC) with multiple input multiple output equalizer (MIMO-EQ) for achieving transmit diversity in a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading channel. In the proposed system, MIMO-EQ equalizes the channel into a temporal intersymbol interference (ISI)-free channel, and then a simple linear processing is used to perform the maximum likelihood (ML) decoding for ST-BC. Also the impacts of antenna correlations on the performance of ST-BC are investigated. Our simulation results show that the proposed system can achieve the full spatial diversity gain, and the SNR loss due to the antenna correlations is within 0.5 dB at 1% of block error rate if the correlation coefficient is less than 0.5.