Effect of keyholes on the symbol error rate of space-time block codes

In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading environments, degenerate channel phenomena, so-called keyholes or pinholes, may exist under realistic assumptions where a MIMO channel has uncorrelated spatial fading between antenna arrays but a rank-deficient transfer matrix. In this letter, we analyze the average symbol error rate (SER) of orthogonal space-time block codes (STBCs) with M-PSK and M-QAM constellations over keyhole channels.