International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.

1, 2013

Comparitive Analysis

of Bit Error Rates of Multiple Input Multiple Output Transmission Schemes

(MIMO)
S.Praseetha1
1

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, 1 SNS College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu prase04@gmail.com

Abstract : Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) transmission schemes such as spatial multiplexing, Space Time Block Codes (STBC) and Space Time Block Coded Spatial Modulation (STBC-SM) methods are compared. The Spatial Multiplexing system such as Vertical Bell Lab Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST) system is proposed. It is a transceiver architecture offering spatial multiplexing over multiple antenna wireless communication systems. In STBC multiple copies of data streams are transmitted, to improve the reliability of data transfer. STBC-SM combines both Spatial modulation (SM) and STBC. In STBCSM the transmitted information are expanded in space, time and spatial domain and hence provides better performance advantage than STBC and V-BLAST. The Bit Error Rate (BER) of these transmission schemes is analyzed for four transmit and four receive antennas. From simulation results it is shown that STBC-SM method provides less BER than V-BLAST and STBC. Keywords: about MIMO systems, space time block codes, spatial modulation.

1. Introduction
Under suitable channel fading conditions, having both multiple transmit and multiple receive antennas provides an additional spatial dimension for communication and yields a degree-of-freedom gain. This additional degree of freedom can be exploited by spatially multiplexing several data streams onto the MIMO channel, and lead to an increase in the capacity. Multiple access system with multiple antennas at the base station allows several users to simultaneously communicate with the base station. The multiple antennas allow spatial separation of the signals from the different users MIMO techniques become the primary tool to increase capacity significantly in the high SNR regime. Several transmission strategies exist for MIMO and here three techniques have been proposed, V-BLAST, STBC and STBC-SM. V-BLAST architecture multiplexes independent data streams on to the transmit antenna array. The linear minimum mean-square-error (MMSE) receiver structures are considered. The performance of these receivers can be enhanced by successively canceling the streams as they are decoded. This is known as successive interference cancellation (SIC). It is shown that the MMSE-SIC receiver achieves the capacity of the fast fading MIMO channel [4]. The V-BLAST architecture is very suboptimal for the slow you fading MIMO channel, it does not code across the transmit antennas and thus the diversity gain is limited by that obtained with the receive antenna array. All antennas transmit their own data streams at the same time and hence results in a high level of inter-channel interference at the receiver and increase complexity of receiver [3]. Thus the error performance of the system is degraded. On the other hand STBC offers low decoding complexity and simpler implementation. But for higher order STBCs the complexity of decoding grows with constellation size [1]. It is also very expensive for future wireless communication systems. Space time codes do not provide array gain due to lack of channel knowledge in the transmitter. In STBC-SM method information is conveyed with an STBC matrix that is transmitted from combinations of the transmit antennas of the corresponding MIMO system. STBC-SM combines both STBC and SM [2], to take advantage of benefits of both the transmission schemes. It is found that STBC-SM provides better advantage than STBC and V-BLAST technique.

2. V-BLAST Technique
V-BLAST takes a single data stream and de-multiplexes it into M sub-streams where M is the number of transmitter antennas. Each sub-stream is encoded into symbols and fed to a separate transmitter. The modulation method employed in these systems are Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK), Quadrature Phase Shift Keying(QPSK), 16-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16-QAM) or 64-QAM. QAM combines phase modulation with amplitude modulation, making it an efficient method for transmitting data over a limited bandwidth channel. BLAST's receivers operate co-channel, each receiving the signals emanating from all M of the transmitting antennas. Here the method is proposed for four transmit and four receive antennas. Since the entire sub streams are transmitted in the same frequency band, spectrum is used very efficiently. At the receiver, an array of antennas is again used to pick up the multiple transmitted sub streams. The MMSE receiver suppresses both the interference and noise components. This implies that the mean square error between the transmitted symbols and the estimate of the receiver is minimized. To take advantage of the additional throughput offered, MIMO wireless systems utilizes a matrix mathematical approach. As shown in Fig.1 data streams a 1,a2,. aM are transmitted from antennas 1, 2,. M. Then there are a variety of paths that can be used with each path having different channel properties. To enable the receiver to be able to differentiate between the different data streams it is necessary to use. These can be represented by the Page | 1

International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.1, 2013

properties h 12, travelling from transmit antenna one to receive antenna 2 and so forth. In this way for a three transmit, three receive antenna system a matrix can be set up: r1 = h 11 a1 + h21 a2 + h 31 a3 (1) r2 = h 12 a1 + h22 a2 + h 32 a3 (2) r3 = h 13 a1 + h23 a2 + h 33 a3 (3) Where r 1 = signal received at antenna 1, r 2 is the signal received at antenna 2 and so forth. In matrix format this can be represented as: To recover the transmitted data-stream at the receiver it is necessary to perform a considerable amount of signal processing. First the MIMO system decoder must estimate the individual channel transfer characteristic h ij to determine the channel transfer matrix. Once all of this has been estimated, then the matrix [H] has been produced and the transmitted data streams can be reconstructed by multiplying the received vector with the inverse of the transfer matrix. This process can be likened to the solving of a set of N linear simultaneous equations to reveal the values of N variables.
[A] = [H]-1 x [R] (5) [R] = [H] x [A] (4)

Figure 1. Block diagram of V-BLAST system

3. STBC Technique
STBC is a technique used in wireless communications to transmit multiple copies of a data stream across a number of antennas and to exploit the various received versions of the data to improve the reliability of data-transfer. The fact that the transmitted signal must traverse a potentially difficult environment with scattering, reflection, refraction and so on and may then be further corrupted by thermal noise in the receiver means that some of the received copies of the data will be 'better' than others. This redundancy results in a higher chance of being able to use one or more of the received copies to correctly decode the received signal. The data stream to be transmitted is encoded in blocks, which are distributed among spaced antennas and across time as shown in the Fig.2. For each input symbol, the space-time encoder chooses the constellation points to transmit from each antenna so that coding and diversity gains are maximized. STBCs are defined by mapping operation of a block of symbols into space and time domain, creating orthogonal sequences that will be transmitted from different transmit antennas. The receiver is composed of channel estimation, combining procedure in both space and time domain and maximum likelihood detection rule. The STBC decoder is simple and achieves the diversity advantage. The following cases of STBC are considered-Alamouti STBC, 1/2 code rate for four transmit antenna and code rate for four transmit antenna. Code rate of an STBC measures how many symbols per time slot. The Alamouti code is the first STBC that provides full diversity at full data rate for two transmit antennas. The information bits are first modulated using the PSK modulation scheme. The encoder takes the block of two modulated symbols s1 and s2 in each encoding operation and hands it to the transmit antennas according to the code matrix, S= s1 -s2* s2 s1*
(6)

The first row represents the first transmission period and the second row the second transmission period. During the first transmission, the symbols s1 and s2 are transmitted simultaneously from antenna one and antenna two respectively. In the second transmission period, the symbol s2* is transmitted from antenna one and the symbol s 1* from transmit antenna two. The two rows and columns of S are orthogonal to each other and the code matrix is orthogonal: SSH
=

s1 -s2*

s2 s1*

s1 -s2*
(7)

s2 s1*

= ( |s1|2 + |s2|2 ) I2

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International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.1, 2013

where I2 is a (2 2) identity matrix. This property enables the receiver to detect s1 and s2 by a simple linear signal processing operation. The received signals at the time t and t + T can then be expressed as, r 1 = s1h1 + s2h2 + n1 (8) r2 = s2*h 1 + s1* h 2 + n 2 (9) where r 1 and r 2 are the received signals at time t and t + T, n 1 and n 2 are complex random variables representing receiver noise and interference. This can be written in matrix form as: r = Sh + n (10) where h = [h1, h2]T is the complex channel vector and n is the noise vector at the receiver. For STBC with four transmit antenna and for code rate the transmission matrix is given as, G3= s1 s2 s3 -s2 s1 s4 -s3 s4 s1 -s4 s3 s2

(11)

Then the process of modulation and detection is similar to Alamouti scheme except that more number of symbols will be included.

Figure 2. Block diagram of STBC transmitter

4. STBC-SM
In the STBC-SM scheme, both STBC symbols and the indices of the transmit antennas from which these symbols are transmitted, carry information. We choose Alamouti STBC and STBC for four transmit and four receive antennas. It is similar to STBC except that the antenna domain is also taken into account. The modulation performed may be BPSK,QPSK, 8-PSK or 16 QAM. For four information bits to be transmitted in two consecutive symbol interval, the first two bits are used to determine the antenna pair position and last two bits determine the BPSK symbol pair as shown in the Fig.3. Here M refers constellation size and c implies the total number of antenna combinations.

5. Comparison of V-BLAST, STBC AND STBC-SM

The results of all the three schemes are compared. It is found that STBC-SM provides better performance compared to VBLAST and STBC. The table I shown below indicates the BER values of different transmission schemes for SNR from 1 to 8 values. It is seen that STBC-SM has minimum error rates and becomes zero for higher values of SNR. Table I Comparison of SNR and BER values SNR Transmission Schemes V-BLAST STBC STBC-SM 1 0.3571 0.3198 0.0015 2 0.3935 0.3214 0.0012 3 0.2706 0.2097 0.0001 4 0.0793 0.1667 0 5 0.0445 0.0961 0 6 0.0425 0.0649 0 7 0.0279 0.0211 0 8 0.0084 0.0266 0

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International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.1, 2013

Figure 3. Block diagram of STBC-SM transmitter

6. Simulation Results
Simulation results of V-BLAST, STBC and STBC-SM are presented. Also these schemes are compared. The Bit Error Rates of these systems are evaluated as a function of Signal To Noise Ratio.
0.25

0.2

0.15 BER 0.1 0.05 0

5 S NR

10

15

Figure 4. BER performance for V-BLAST system using 16 QAM.

0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2 BER 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 0

5 SNR

10

15

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International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.1, 2013

Figure 5. BER performance of V-BLAST system for 64 QAM The V-BLAST system uses MMSE detection with ordered successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding. For STBC, the Alamouti scheme and the code rate scheme for four transmit and four receive antenna are evaluated .

10

10

-1

S y m b o l E rro r P ro b a b ility

10

-2

10

-3

10

-4

4 5 S N R / (d B )

Figure 6. BER performance of Alamouti STBC

6 x 10
-4

BER

4 SNR

Figure 7. BER performance of code rate STBC It is seen that code rate provides better performance advantage than Alamouti STBC since number of antennas are increased.

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International Journal of Science and Engineering Technology (IJSET) Vol. 1, No.1, 2013

x 10

-4

BER

4 S NR

Figure 8. BER performance of STBC-SM for 16-QAM

0.4 0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0 V -B LA S T S TB C S TB C-S M

BER

4 S NR

Figure 9. Comparison of BER performance of V-BLAST, STBC AND STBC-SM Comparing the three schemes it can be seen that the STBC-SM scheme is the best.For higher values of SNR the BER of STBC-SM decreases and approches zero values.

7. Conclusion
In this paper a high rate transmission scheme called STBC-SM method is introduced which is compared with other MIMO transmission schemes called V-BLAST and STBC. Through computer simulations it is shown that STBC-SM offers significant improvements in BER performance compared to V-BLAST and STBC systems. Simulations are performed assuming four transmit and four receive antennas for MIMO structure. STBC-SM scheme can be very useful for emerging wireless communication systems such as WiMAX and LTE.

References
[1] V. Tarokh, H. Jafarkhani, and A. R. Calderbank, Space-ime block codes from orthogonal designs," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. no. 5, pp. 1456-1467, July 1999. [2] J. Jeganathan, A. Ghrayeb, and L. Szczecinski, Spatial modulation:optimal detection and performance analysis," IEEE Commun. Lett. , vol.12, no. 8, pp. 545-547, Aug. 2008.

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[3]

P. Wolniansky, G. Foschini, G. Golden, and R.Valenzuela, V-BLAST:an architecture for realizing very high data rates over the rich-scattering wireless channel," in Proc. International Symp. Signals, Syst., Electron. (ISSSE98), Pisa, Italy, pp. 295- 300, Sep. 1998. [4] S. M. Alamouti, A simple transmit diversity technique for wireless communications," IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 16, no. 8, pp. 1451-1458, Oct. 1998. [5] J. Jeganathan, A. Ghrayeb, and L. Szczecinski, Generalized space shift keying modulation for MIMO channels," in Proc. IEEE Symp. Pers.Indoor Mobile Radio Commun. (PIMRC), Cannes, France, Sep. 2008. [6] X. Guo and X.-G. Xia, On full diversity space-time block codes with partial interference cancellation group decoding, "IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory , vol. 55, no. 10, pp. 4366-4385, Oct. 2009. [7] R. Mesleh, H. Haas, C. W. Ahn, and S. Yun, Spatial modulation a new low complexity spectral efficiency enhancing technique," in Proc. Conf.Commun. Netw. China, Beijing, China, pp. 1-5, Oct. 2006. [8] E. Biglieri, Y. Hong, and E. Viterbo, On fast-decodable space-time block codes," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory , vol. 55, no. 2, pp. 524-530, Feb.2009. [9] S. L. Loyka, Channel capacity of MIMO architecture using the exponential correlation matrix," IEEE Commun. Lett. , vol. 5, pp. 369-371,Sep. 2001. [10] Paulraj, R. Nabar, and D. Gore, Introduction to Space-Time Wireless Communications . Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Author Profile
Mrs. S. Praseetha is currently working as an assistant professor at SNS college of technology, Coimbatore. She has secured her M.E. degree in Communication systems from Karpagam college of engineering, Coimbatore. She has completed her B.E. in ECE from VLB Janakiammal college of engineering, Coimbatore. She has a working experience of three years and has presented papers related to MIMO at National conference held at Sri Krishna college of engineering, Coimbatore.

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