On Modeling of Maximum Likelihood Demodulation of Bit Interleaved Coded Modulation with Multiple Transmit Antennas

Advanced multiple antenna techniques are currently being considered in the evolution of today´s wireless communication systems as well as in the development of future systems. The identification, assessment, comparison and selection of relevant techniques do in general require performance evaluations at adequate operating points in various deployments and this calls for system level evaluations. Modeling of individual links´ performance is then needed and this is also of interest for the development of link adaptation strategies. The present paper considers link performance modeling of bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) in combination with multiple transmit antennas and non-iterative receiver processing. More specifically, previous studies of the single antenna case have shown that a model based on mutual information for BICM is suitable, and the present work demonstrates that this is the case also for BICM with multiple transmit antennas. However, the calculation of the BICM mutual information is not trivial and this topic deserves further attention.