Application of Transmit Diversity to Rapidly Time Varying Channels with Partial Channel Knowledge at the Receiver

Abstract

For coherent detection, accurate channel knowledge is required at the receiver. But in rapidly time varying channels this leads to poor spectral efficiency. A possible compromise is to use partial channel knowledge at the receiver. However as can be seen from [3], partial channel knowledge degrades the BER performance over rapidly time varying channels. In this paper, we consider Alamouti’s [1] transmit diversity scheme over rapidly time varying channel with partial knowledge, derive BER expression and match it with Monte Carlo simulations, show that it is possible to significantly improve the BER performance along with simultaneous reduction in channel estimation rate and also show that by staggering the partial channel information at the receive antenna, a performance can be even further improved.