Performance of orthogonal space-time coded MCPM system in correlated channels

The paper investigates the average pair-wise error probability (PWEP) performance of orthogonal space-time coded MCPM (OST-MCPM) systems for two transmit antennas over independent and correlated channels. Simple upper boundary expression at high SNR is derived to evaluate the PWEP in correlated channel. The achievable diversity gain of this system decreases due to the signal correlation between the antennas. Simulation results show that the error performance over a correlated channel is degraded when the correlation coefficient increases. And the penalty on the code performance increases a lot in fully correlated channel. It can also be seen that the diversity gain decreases when the channel is fully correlated, which matches well with the theoretical analysis. The upper bounds can be looser when diversity order decreases. The effects of antenna spacing and azimuth power distribution parameters (angle of arrival/departure and angular spread) on the performance of OST-MCPM are also simulated.