Recently, it has been proven that employing more than one transmit antenna increases channel throughput, and different strategies have been developed in order to achieve transmit diversity advantage. Space-time codes combine coding gain with diversity gain and preserve orthogonality between antennas, whereas BLAST (Bell Labs Layered Space-Time Architecture) technology transmits different independent bitstreams from each transmit antenna and employs an interference nulling-interference cancelling decoding algorithm. In this paper we present a comparison of these transmit diversity techniques in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) for a MultiInput Multi-Output (MIMO) channel, specifically we compare space-time block codes (STBC), space-time trellis codes (STTC) and BLAST architecture).

Peer Reviewed