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Performance Analysis of Wireless MIMO System by

Using Alamoutis Scheme and Maximum Ratio


Combining Technique

Muhammad Sana Ullah
Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology
Chittagong4349, Bangladesh
hi.sanam@yahoo.com
Mohammed Jashim Uddin
Dept. of Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering
International Islamic University Chittagong
Chittagong-4203, Bangladesh
jashimcuet@yahoo.com


AbstractWith the integration of Internet and multimedia
applications in next generation wireless communications, the
demand for wide-band high data rate communication services is
growing. As the available radio spectrum is limited, higher data
rates can be achieved only by designing more efficient signaling
techniques. Recent research in information theory has shown
that large gains in capacity of communication over wireless
channels are feasible in multiple input multiple output (MIMO)
systems as well as significantly enhances the system performance
compared to conventional systems in fading multipath channel
environment. The MIMO channel is constructed with multiple
element array antennas at both ends of the wireless link. All these
MIMO techniques are based on proper handling of (Alamouti
scheme and maximum ratio combining method) signals
transmitted and received by an array of antennas. Simulation
results show very high performance in terms of bit error rate,
even for low signal-to-noise ratios.
Keywords-AWGN channel, Diversity technique, BER, MIMO,
SISO, SNR, Rayleigh fading channel.
I. INTRODUCTION
In broad sense, the term communications refers to the
sending, receiving and processing of information by electronic
means. It is the technique of transmitting a message, from one
point to another, knowing how much information, if any, is
likely to be lost in the process [1]. Hence, the term
"communication is covered all forms of distance
communications including radio, telegraphy, television,
telephony, data communication and computer networking.
Communications started with wire telegraphy in the eighteen
forties, developing with telephony some decades later and
radio at the beginning of this century. More recently, the use of
satellites and fiber optics has made communications even more
widespread, with an increasing emphasis on computer and
other data communications [1-2]. A modern communications
system is first concerned with the sorting, processing and
sometimes storing of information before its transmission. The
actual transmission then follows, with further processing and
filtering of noise. Finally it come reception, which may include
processing steps such as decoding, storage and interpretation
[4]. Demands for capacity in wireless Communications, driven
by Cellular mobile, Internet and Multimedia services have been
rapidly increasing worldwide. On the other hand available
radio spectrum is limited and the Communication capacity
needs cannot be met without a significant increase in
communication spectral efficiency. Advances in coding, such
as Turbo codes, Low density parity check codes and Space
time codes [1],[6],[9],[15-16] made it feasible to approach the
Shannon capacity limit in system with a single antenna link.
Significant further advances in spectral efficiency are available
though increasing the number of antennas at both transmitter
and the receiver which is as MIMO technology. It is one of
several forms of smart antenna technology. In fact, the MIMO
concept is much more general and embraces many other
scenarios such as wireline digital subscriber line (DSL)
systems [13] and single-antenna frequency-selective channels
[1, 2, 14]. MIMO technology has attracted attention in wireless
communications, because it offers significant increases in data
throughput and link range without additional bandwidth or
transmit power. It is achieved by higher spectral efficiency
(more bits per second per hertz of bandwidth) and link
reliability or diversity (reduced fading). Because of these
properties, MIMO is an important part of modern wireless
communication standards such as IEEE 802.11n(Wifi), 4G,
3GPP Long Term Evolution, WiMAX and HSPA+. The aim of
this paper is to approach AWGN channel performance from
Rayleigh fading channel performance by using Alamouti
diversity and Maximum ratio combining technique with
increasing the number of transmitting and receiving antennas at
low SNR 22 and/or 14 MIMO wireless communication
system.
This paper is organized as follows. Besides MIMO system
model, the mathematical view of total received signal power is
described in Section II. In section III provided the degradation
effect of fading. Explanation of diversity technique including
Alamouti scheme and Maximum ratio combining technique are
given in Section IV whereas Section V viewed the simulation
results, followed by conclusion in Section VI.
II. THE MIMO SYSTEM MODEL
When a transmitter and a receiver, with an appropriate
channel coding/decoding scheme, are equipped with multiple
antennas, the presence of multipath fading can improve by
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achievable transmission rates [3]. For such MIMO channels,
several optimum space-time codes have been designed. Now,
let us consider a single point-to-point MIMO system with
arrays of

transmit and

receive antennas. In this case


focus on a complex base band linear system model described in
discrete time. The general modeling of a channel as an abstract
MIMO channel allows for a unified treatment using a compact
convenient vector-matrix notation. The system block diagram
is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. MIMO system model
The transmitted signals in each symbol period are represented
by a

column matrix , where the



th component of

, refers to the transmitted signal from antenna . A Gaussian


channel has been considered, for which, according to
information theory, the optimum distribution of transmitted
signals is also Gaussian. Thus, the elements of are
considered to be zero mean independent and identically
distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian variables. In [1], the covariance
matrix of the transmitted signal is given by

}

where { } denoted the expectation and the operator


denoted the Hermitian of matrix , which means the transpose
and component-wise complex conjugate of . According to
Vucetic et al in [1], the total transmitted power is constrained
to

regardless of the number of transmit antennas

. It can
be represented as


where denoted the trace of matrix , obtained as the
sum of the diagonal elements of . By using the linear model,
the received vector can be represented as



where is the channel matrix. Now, the received signal
covariance matrix, defined as {

}, by using Eq. (3), is


given by



While the total received signal power can be expressed as

.
III. DEGRADATION EFFECTS OF FADING
The mobile radio channel is a time-varying multipath
channel and is subject to physical propagation path loss [17].
The time-variations are caused by the medium changes as the
vehicles moves. The propagation losses are related to both the
atmospheric propagation and the terrain configuration [12]. In
[7], Sklar viewed that the multipath aspect is caused by
different scatterers and reflectors such as building or trees that
surround the mobile unit which is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Multipath fading Phenomenon.

As a result of these propagation phenomena in a narrow-band
transmission, where narrow-band is defined with respect to the
coherence bandwidth of the channel [4], [11], the receive signal
affect the performance of the receiver which results in an
increase of bit error rate (BER). The channel performance is
shown in Fig. 3 which viewed the three major performance
categories in terms of error probability

versus signal to
noise ratio (

).

Fig. 3. Error Performance: The good, the bad, and the awful.
The left most exponentially shape curve shown that at a
reasonable signal to noise ratio level, good performance can
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
10
-6
10
-5
10
-4
10
-3
10
-2
10
-1
10
0
BER Comparison
Eb/No in (dB)
E
r
r
o
r

P
r
o
b
a
b
i
l
i
t
y

(
P
b
)


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be expected in a AWGN interference. The middle curve
known as Rayleigh limit, shown a performance degradation
resulting from a loss in signal to noise ratio which is the
consequence of flat fading or slow fading [7]. The remaining
curve that reached an irreducible error-rate level, sometimes
called an error-floor, where the bit-error-probability can level
off at values nearly equal to

. This shows the severe


degradation in performance due to fast fading or frequency
selective fading. In such cases zero amount of signal to noise
ratio will help to achieve the desired level of bit-error
probability

. In that situation only approach available for


improving performance is to use some form of mitigation
techniques to remove or reduce the signal distortion. The
mitigation method depends on whether the distortion is caused
by frequency selective fading or fast fading [7]. Once the
signal distortion has been mitigated, the

versus (

)
curve can transition from awful category to the bad Rayleigh
limit curve. Next approach is to further strive towards AWGN
system performance by using some sort of diversity and
powerful error correction code.

IV. DEGRADATION EFFECTS OF FADING
Diversity is a technique of transmitting multiple copies of
the same signal. This technique requires a number of signal
transmission paths known as diversity branches and each
branch carries the same information with approximately
uncorrelated or dissimilar multipath fading characteristics. The
diversity technique also requires combining circuit so as to
combine signals from each diversity branch or select only best
signal out of different received signals [1].
In wireless mobile communications, diversity techniques are
widely used to reduce the effects of multipath fading and
improve the reliability of transmission without increasing the
transmitted power or sacrificing the bandwidth. The diversity
technique requires multiple replicas of the transmitted signals
at the receiver, all carrying the same information but with small
correlation in fading statistics. The basic idea of diversity is
that, if two or more independent samples of a signal are taken,
these samples will fade in an uncorrelated manner, e.g., some
samples are severely faded while others are less attenuated.
This means that the probability of all the samples being
simultaneously below a given level is much lower than the
probability of any individual sample being below that level.
Thus, a proper combination of the various samples results in
greatly reduced severity of fading, and correspondingly,
improved reliability of transmission.

A. Alamoutis scheme
The Alamoutis scheme is historically the first space-time
block code to provide full transmit diversity for systems with
two transmit antennas [1]. It is worthwhile to mention that
delay diversity schemes can also achieve a full diversity, but
they introduce interference between symbols and complex
detectors are required at the receiver. In this section,
Alamoutis transmit diversity technique; including encoding
and decoding algorithms have being represented.
1) Alamouti space time encoding: In Fig. 4 has shown the
block diagram of the Alamoutis space-time encoder. Let us
assume that an M-ary modulation scheme is used. In the
Alamoutis space-time encoder [5], each group of m
information bits is first modulated, where

. Then,
the encoder takes a block of two modulated symbols


and


in each encoding operation and maps them to the transmit
antennas according to a code matrix given by

[

]

Fig. 4. A Block diagram of the Alamouti space-time encoder.
The encoder outputs are transmitted in two consecutive
transmission periods from two transmit antennas. During the
first transmission period, two signals

and

are transmitted
simultaneously from antenna one and antenna two,
respectively. In the second transmission period, signal

is
transmitted from transmit antenna one and signal

from
transmit antenna two, where

is the complex conjugate of

. It is clear that the encoding is done in both the space and


time domains. Let us denote the transmit sequence from
antennas one and two by

and

, respectively.

]
The key feature of the Alamoutis scheme is that the transmit
sequences from the two transmit antennas are orthogonal,
since the inner product of the sequences

and

is zero, i.e.



The code matrix has the following property

[
|

]
|


where


is a 2 2 identity matrix.

Information
Source

Modulator
| |
2 1
x x

Encoder
| |
(

-
-
1 2
2 1
2 1
x x
x x
x x

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2) Receiver of Alamouti scheme: Let us assume that one
receive antenna is used at the receiver. The block diagram of
the receiver for the Alamoutis scheme [1] is shown in Fig. 5.
The fading channel coefficients from the first and second
transmit antennas to the receive antenna at time t are denoted
by

and

, respectively. Assuming that the fading


coefficients are constant across two consecutive symbol
transmission periods, they can be expressed as follows



where |

| and

are the amplitude gain and phase


shift for the path from transmit antenna i to the receive antenna,
and T is the symbol duration.


Fig. 5. Receiver for the Alamouti scheme.
At the receiver antenna, the received signals over two
consecutive symbol periods, denoted by

and

for time t and


t+T, respectively, can be expressed as


where

and

are independent complex variables with zero


mean and power spectral density

per dimension,
representing additive white Gaussian noise samples at time t
and t + T, respectively.
B. Maximum Ratio Combining
Maximum ratio combining is a linear combining method.
In a general linear combining process, various signal inputs
are individually weighted and added together to get an output
signal. The weighting factors can be chosen in several ways. A
block diagram of a maximum ratio combining diversity is
shown in Fig. 6. The output signal is a linear combination of a
weighted replica of all of the received signals. It is given by



where

is the received signal at receive antenna i, and

is
the weighting factor for receive antenna i.


Fig. 6. Block diagram of maximum ratio combining diversity.

In maximum ratio combining, the weighting factor of each
receive antenna is chosen to be in proportion to its own signal
voltage to noise power ratio. Let

and

be the amplitude
and phase of the received signal

, respectively. Assuming
that each receive antenna has the same average noise power,
the weighting factor

can be represented as


RF
Front
End
RF
Front
End

RF
Front
End


+

Detector
Output
Rx
1
Rx
2
Rx
R
n
1
r

2
r

R
n
r

..
R
n
o

1
o

2
o

+
Channel
Estimator
Signal
Combiner
Maximum Likelihood Decoder
1
x

2
x

2 1
, n n
Noise
Transmit
Antenna 2
Transmit
Antenna 1
1

h

2

h

1
x

2
x

Receive
antenna
1
h
2
h
-

2
x

-
1
x
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This method is called optimum combining since it can
maximize the output SNR. It is shown that the maximum
output SNR is equal to the sum of the instantaneous SNRs of
the individual signals. In this scheme, each individual signal
must be co-phased, weighted with its corresponding amplitude
and then summed. This scheme requires the knowledge of
channel fading amplitude and signal phases. So, it can be used
in conjunction with coherent detection, but it is not practical
for non coherent detection.
V. SIMULATION RESULT
In this work, MATLAB is used to test the channel
performance using diversity technique based on BPSK
modulation scheme. By applying Alamoutis diversity and/or
Maximum ratio combining technique, it is possible to make
channel response from Rayleigh fading channel to AWGN
channel.



Fig. 7. Performance analysis of SISO (No diversity (1Tx,
1Rx)) and MIMO (Alamouti (2Tx, 1Rx) and Maximum ratio
combining (1Tx, 2Rx)) system.

From Fig. 7 it is seen that channel performance is improved
but does not seem like AWGN channel for 21 or 12 MIMO
configuration. When the number of transmitting and receiving
antenna is increased like Alamouti (2Tx, 2Rx) or Maximum
ratio combining (1Tx, 4Rx), the channel performance just like
AWGN channel with constant SNR. The result is shown in
Fig. 8.


Fig. 8. Performance analysis of SISO (No diversity (1Tx,
1Rx)) and MIMO (Alamouti (2Tx, 2Rx) and Maximum ratio
combining (1Tx, 4Rx)) system.

Following Table I gives the comparison result among no
diversity, Alamoutis scheme and Maximum ratio combining
method for a particular SNR.

TABLE I
COMPARISON BETWEEN SISO (NO DIVERSITY) AND MIMO (ALAMOUTI AND
MAXIMUM RATIO COMBINING TECHNIQUE) SYSTEM

SNR
in dB
Diversity technique Bit Error Rate
(BER)



10
No diversity (1Tx,1Rx) 0.02314
Alamouti (2Tx,1Rx)

Alamouti (2Tx, 2Rx)
0.005665

0.0001161
Maximum ratio
combining (1Tx, 2Rx)

Maximum ratio
Combining (1Tx, 4Rx)

0.001722


0.00001058


VI. CONCLUSION
A noble method diversity technique for estimating the
channel performance of mobile communication signals
affected by Rayleigh multipath fading phenomena is
discussed. The performance of Alamouti scheme and
Maximum ratio combining technique are evaluated under the
assumption of BPSK signals affected by reflection, defraction
and scattering environment. It is shown that in wireless MIMO
system based on Alamouti diversity technique and Maximum
ratio combining technique can help to combat and mitigate
against Rayleigh fading channel and approach AWGN channel
performance with constant transmit power. For this reason,
multi-antenna MIMO channels have recently become an
attractive scheme means to increase quality of wireless
communications by the use of spatial diversity at both sides of
the link and occupies a considerable part of todays academic
research.
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
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Eb/No(in dB)
B
E
R
Performance Analysis using Diversity Technique


No Diversity (1Tx, 1Rx)
Alamouti (2Tx, 1Rx)
Maximal-Ratio Combining (1Tx, 2Rx)
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
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0
Eb/No (in dB)
B
E
R
Performance of Diversity Technique and Other Comparisons


No Diversity (1Tx, 1Rx), BPSK
Alamouti (2Tx, 2Rx), BPSK
Maximal-Ratio Combining (1Tx, 4Rx), BPSK
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wishes to express his gratitude to computer
simulation lab for interest and support throughout the course of
the simulation result described in this paper. The authors also
gratefully acknowledge the contributions of S. M. Alamouti, V.
Tarokh, H. Jafarkhami and A.R. Calderbank for their work on
Space time block codes and diversity technique of this
document.
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BIBLOOGRAPHY
Muhammad Sana Ullah (B.Sc.08- ) was born in
Kishoreganj, Bangladesh. He received Bachelor of
Science in Electrical & Electronic Engineering
degree from Chittagong University of Engineering
& Technology in 2008. He is currently a Lecturer
in the Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering of Chittagong University of
Engineering & Technology. His research interests include digital signal
processing and wireless communication and biomedical engineering.

Mohammed Jashim Uddin was born in 1979 in
Chittagong, Bangladesh. He received the B.Sc.
degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering
from Chittagong University of Engineering &
Technology (CUET), Chittagong, Bangladesh and
the M.Sc. degree in Electronic and Communication
Engineering from University of Greenwich,
Medway, UK in 2004 and 2009, respectively.
Since 2004, he has been involved at PHP Float
Glass Industry, Chittagong,
Bangladesh as an Assistant Engineer, where he was engaged with the 10MW
power plant for Gas and Diesel generator. In 2006, he joined at MARS
Textile Limited, Chittagong, Bangladesh as a Senior Engineer. In 2008, he
worked for Texcel Technology plc, Dartford, UK as a Test Technician, where
his responsibility was involved with PCB Testing, Inspection and Assembly.
His Research interests are Renewable and Sustainable Energy, Solar cell, RF
and Microwave Power Amplifier and Antenna & Wave Propagation and
signal processing. He is currently serving as a Lecturer in International
Islamic University Chittagong under the Electronic and Telecommunication
Engineering Department.

















































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