Performance comparison of Alamouti ST codes with different STTC over Rayleigh fading channels

This paper presents performance comparison of Alamouti space-time codes with different Space-Time Trellis Codes (STTC) codes. In our comparison, we utilize the STTC generator sequences from Tarokh/ Seshadri/ Calderbank (TSC) codes, Baro/ Bauch/ Hansmann (BBH) codes and the Vucetic and Yuan (VY) codes. The performance comparisons are made on the basis of bit error rate (BER) and symbol error rate (SER) performance metrics over slow Rayleigh fading channel with QPSK modulation scheme. Comparison results show that Alamouti space-time codes outperform the space-time trellis codes (STTC) for less number of receive antennas but with an increase in the number of receive antennas the performance of both of these codes are closer and for most of the cases it is the same for both types of codes. Thus, for large number of receive antennas the results recommend that space-time trellis codes (STTC) be used as they provide an additional advantage of coding gain as compared to the Alamouti space-time codes. Results also show that codes having higher value of minimum determinant show better performance than that of those having less value of minimum determinant.