Comparison of code rate and transmit diversity in MIMO systems

A thesis submitted in ful lment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in the Centre of Excellence in Telecommunications and Software School of Electrical and Information Engineering, March 2016In order to compare low rate error correcting codes to MIMO schemes with transmit diversity, two systems with the same throughput are compared. A VBLAST MIMO system with (15; 5) Reed-Solomon coding is compared to an Alamouti MIMO system with (15; 10) Reed-Solomon coding. The latter is found to perform signi cantly better, indicating that transmit diversity is a more e ective technique for minimising errors than reducing the code rate. The Guruswami-Sudan/Koetter-Vardy soft decision decoding algorithm was implemented to allow decoding beyond the conventional error correcting bound of RS codes and VBLAST was adapted to provide reliability information. Analysis is also performed to nd the optimal code rate when using various MIMO systems.MT201