BER performance of OSTBCs on correlated fading channels with imperfect channel estimation

In this contribution, we examine the bit error rate (BER) performance of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) under flat-fading channels with imperfect channel state information. We present new exact BER expressions for PAM and QAM signal constellations, regardless of the fading distribution. Furthermore, we show how these expressions can be efficiently and accurately evaluated for the case of arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-m fading channels. As the high diversity order resulting from the application of OSTBCs gives rise to small BER values, the numerical evaluation of the presented BER expressions is much faster than straightforward computer simulations.