Pulse Shaping in MIMO COFDM over Rayleigh Fading Channels

In order to improve the performance of space-time coded (STC) multiple input multiple output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) enhancements were implemented in a MatLab simulation by shaping the OFDM pulses transmitted through various terrestrial Rayleigh fading channel models. The goal is to achieve the lowest possible BER to overcome channel effects. The pulse shaping investigated achieved high data rates by being overlapped in the time domain, equalisation was then used to suppress the resulting intersymbol interference. Our finding after researching a number of pulses is that the harris-moerder pulse was the most successful. Unlike the other pulse shapes this shape performs better in a Rayleigh fading channel than in an approximated AWGN channel. This also indicates that simulations using an overly simplified channel model can give results that are likely to be contrary to performance in the real physical environment.