Optimal Sampling Period and Required Number of Samples for OSTBC-MIMO Rayleigh Fading Channel Capacity Simulators

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the performance assessment of channel capacity simulators. Here, we consider the instantaneous capacity (also referred to as the mutual information) in orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) transceiver systems over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fading channels. To ensure that the level-crossing rate (LCR) of the instantaneous capacity can efficiently and accurately be simulated, we derive closed-form approximate solutions to the optimal sampling period and the required number of samples to be generated. Several numerical examples will be presented to illustrate the usefulness of our procedure. It will also be shown that the distribution of the duration of the capacity outage intervals is more sensitive to the variation of the sampling period than the LCR. The presented results are important for the confirmation by simulation of the correctness of theoretical derivations of the instantaneous channel capacity´s LCR.