Symbol Error Outage Analysis of MIMO OSTBC Systems over Rice Fading Channels in Shadowing Environments

We deal with the analytical performance study of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems experiencing non-frequency selective fast fading and shadowing. We address the problem of finding a tractable closed-form expression for the symbol error outage (SEO) over Rice fading channels in shadowing environments. In order to obtain the SEO, a symbol error probability (SEP) inversion w.r.t. the average signal to noise ratio (ASNR) is needed since no invertible SEP approximations are available in literature. We propose an accurate approximation for the SEP in Rice fading channels. This new approximation is proved to be invertible w.r.t. the ASNR and this expression thus facilitates the derivation of a tight approximation of the SEO in lognormal shadowing environments.