Abstract
Alamouti's orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) is a simple yet important technique to take advantage of transmit diversity to mitigate fading channel effects. In this paper, we analyze the effects of time-selective channels and channel estimation errors on the bit error rate (BER) performance of Alamouti's OSTBC. We develop an analytical expression of the BER performance for the linear decoding with minimum mean squared error (MMSE) channel estimates in place of the true channel. Based on the expression, we derive a BER performance limit in decision-directed mode where the channel is tracked with Kalman filtering. Numerical examples are provided to validate our analysis and to see the impact of time-selective fading and channel estimation errors on the BER performance.
