Effect of joint spatial correlation on the diversity performance of space-time block codes

We characterize the effect of joint spatial correlation on the diversity performance of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The joint spatial correlation is structured by the coupling matrix whose elements determine the average power coupling between the transmit and receive eigenmodes. We first derive the closed-form expression for the exact symbol error probability (SEP) of orthogonal space-time block codes over jointly correlated MIMO Rayleigh-fading channels. We then show that the achievable diversity order is equal to the number of nonzero elements of the power coupling matrix and establish the Schur monotonicity theorems on the SEP and the effective fading figure as a functional of elements of the power coupling matrix.