On the MIMO Channel Capacity of Multi-Dimensional Signal Sets

Abstract

In this contribution we evaluate the capacity of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems using multi-dimensional PSK/QAM signal sets. It was shown that transmit diversity is capable of narrowing the gap between the capacity of the Rayleigh-fading channel and the AWGN channel. However, since this gap becomes narrower when the receiver diversity order is increased, for higher-order receiver diversity the performance advantage of transmit diversity diminishes. A MIMO system having full multiplexing gain has a higher achievable throughput than the corresponding MIMO system designed for full diversity gain, although this is attained at the cost of a higher complexity and a higher SNR. The tradeoffs between diversity gain, multiplexing gain, complexity and bandwidth are studied