MIMO group-orthogonal code-division multiplex: A unified treatment of diversity in multicarrier systems

Multicarrier and multiple transmit/receive antenna have become two key technologies underpinning most of the current development and research efforts towards ubiquitous high-throughput wireless communications. Both techniques can be used to increase the link throughput and/or to improve its robustness against channel fading and noise. This paper presents a unified bit error rate analysis for a particular flavour of multicarrier, namely, group-orthogonal code-division multiplex (GO-CDM), in combination with multiple Tx/Rx antennas. This system can be shown to encompass many of current wireless architectures and the analysis is general enough to incorporate the effects of channel frequency selectivity and Tx and/or Rx antenna correlation. The main outcome of this paper is a general analytical framework suitable to study the effects of the different types of diversity in multicarrier systems. More particularly, it is shown how GO-CDM can play an important role in improving the performance of MIMO-OFDM systems.