Performance comparison of the systems employing multiple antennas over spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channel

In this paper, we extend the open-loop and closed-loop diversity schemes for the systems employing multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver, and analyze the performance of those schemes in the spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channel. The SNR and average symbol error rate of the open-loop diversity are analytically derived, and those of the closed-loop diversity are investigated via Monte-Carlo simulation. The performance of the closed-loop diversity is always better than that of the open-loop diversity over the same diversity order channel. While transmit-only and receive-only diversity schemes can make the full diversity gain, the systems employing multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver cannot. Therefore it is better to put all the antennas at transmitter or receiver for the closed-loop diversity to obtain the full diversity gain