BER and spectral efficiency of a MIMO system

Recent research has confirmed that MIMO systems give high spectral efficiency based on the theoretical Shannon formula. However, the possibility of giving the promised efficiency with negligible or tolerable data error for the receiver is an issue to be considered as important as the theoretical efficiency. Quality aspects of MIMO systems in terms of BER are discussed and some results are documented for a Rayleigh fading channel. The channel is assumed known at the transmitter and the receiver, which might be possible in a TDD or FDD system with feedback and a quasi-stationary environment. It is also shown that it is possible to point a beam in the direction of few scatterers for an environment with no angular spread. The performance of space-time block coding (STBC) and V-BLAST is compared with our MIMO system model, which is based on SVD. The maximum eigenvalued channel attains the best possible performance in terms of BER.