MIMO beamforming in spatially and temporally correlated channel

In modern wireless communication systems, multi-element antenna arrays are popularly used for improving the capacity and reliability of wireless communication links. An attractive candidate in this regard is multi input multi output (MIMO) system. The MIMO system rely upon two schemes such as spatial multiplexing which improves multiplexing gain and beamforming which increases diversity gain. In this paper we compare the performances of beamforming and spatial multiplexing keeping data rate equal for both the schemes in a spatially and temporally correlated flat fading MIMO channel. The bit error rate (BER) performance is evaluated using maximum likelihood (ML) decoding technique. For better performance power allocation strategy is implemented at the transmitting end. The experimental results show that for higher values of spatial and temporal correlation beamforming performs better than spatial multiplexing.