Dual Hop MIMO OSTBC for LMS Communication

For a multiple antenna land mobile satellite (LMS) communication system with a terrestrial relay node, the system performance when channel state information (CSI) is not available at the source and the relay is analyzed. The system employs orthogonal space time block code (OSTBC) encoding with fixed gain amplify and forward (AF) relaying. The moment generating function (MGF) and first and second moments of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the destination are derived in exact closed form. The average symbol error rate (SER) and the amount of fading (AoF) of the system are also derived.