Performance analysis of a trellis coded beamforming scheme for MIMO fading channels

The paper presents a trellis coded beamforming scheme for MIMO fading channels. We propose that if the channel state information is available at the transmitter and the coded signals are weighted with the relevant channel information before transmission, the system with a single receiver antenna can actually achieve full transmit diversity and coding gain, without the complex design of space-time codes. The error performances of such schemes over fast and slow Rayleigh fading channels are derived. It is shown that on a fast Rayleigh fading channel, the code effective length and the product distances should be maximized to achieve higher performance gain, while on a slow Rayleigh fading channel, the minimum squared Euclidean distance between pairwise sequences should be maximized. Furthermore, we show that this trellis coded beamforming scheme outperforms space-time trellis coded beamforming schemes. Simulations on slow and fast Rayleigh fading channels have been conducted and they match very closely with the theoretically calculated upper bounds.