Performance of STBCs with Linear Maximum Likelihood Decoder in time-selective channels

We present the bit error rate (BER) analyses of orthogonal space-time block codes (O-STBCs) and their modified version (MO-STBCs), with linear maximum likelihood decoder (LMLD) over uncorrelated and time-selective fading channels of generalized statistics. First, we quantify the effective diversity achieved by O-STBCs and MO-STBCs by resorting to a statistical characterization of the diversity gain of both schemes with LMLD. Finally, we expand the theoretical BER expressions of O-STBCs, derived for the block fading channels, to MO-STBCs with LMLD in a more practical time-selective fading channel with Gray code mapped M-ary PSK and M-ary QAM modulations.