Bit Error Rate Performance Analysis of Different

Diversity Techniques for various Channels and also

modeling the channel effect
1
Trilochan Patra, 2Sanjib Sil, 3Manabendra Maity
1
Techno India College of Technology, Rajarhat, kolkata-700156
2
Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management, Tollygunge,kol-700040
3
Techno India College of Technology, Rajarhat, kolkata-700156
E-mail-trilochanpatra266@gmail.com,sanjib_sil@hotmail.com,manab1972@yahoo.com

Abstract— Signal fading is a large problem in the wireless
communication system. In wireless communication the
requirements of high data rate, high signal power, and link
reliability call a new technique i.e. MIMO system which satisfies
the above requirements and minimize signal fading. MIMO
system uses multiple antennas at both transmitter and receiver.
MIMO system achieves slight capacity gain and diversity gain
than conventional single antenna system. In this paper we have
constructed four different MIMO channels of different sample
time, different frequency, different path delay and different path
gain. we also compare the BER for different transmit diversity
vs. receive diversity technique for this four MIMO channels. We
also model the channel effect i.e. how the signal fading is
randomly changed when an input signal passes through different
constructed MIMO channels. The MIMO channel is the
frequency selective Rayleigh channel. We also conclude for which
channel and diversity technique BER is minimum. Here we have
used BPSK digital modulation technique. For simulation we have
used MATLAB 2009b software.
technique is different from the smart antenna techniques and it
is developed to increase the performance of a single data
signal, i.e. beam forming and diversity technique. In MIMO
technique, a transmitter sends multiple data streams by
multiple transmitting antennas [4]. The transmit stream passes
through a matrix channel. The matrix channel comprises of
NtNr paths between the Nt transmit antennas at the transmitter
side and Nr receive antennas at the receiver side. Then, the
receiver collects the received signal vectors by the multiple
receiving antennas and decodes the received signal vectors
into the original signal information.
A. Mimo Channel Model
A channel model is needed to properly assess a MIMO
channel. The MIMO system configuration typically contains
M antennas at the transmitter and N antennas at the receiver
front end as illustrated in the following figure.

Keywords—Bit Error Rate (BER), Eb/No, MRC Technique,

Alamouti code, MIMO channel

I. INTRODUCTION
In radio communication system, multiple-input and multiple-
output system or MIMO system is a method which multiply
the capacity of a radio link using multiple transmitting and
receiving antennas to exploit multipath propagation [1]. Now a
days, MIMO has become an essential technique of wireless
communication system including IEEE 802.11n (Wi-Fi), IEEE
802.11ac (Wi-Fi), Long Term Evolution (LTE 4G) etc.
Recently, MIMO technique has been applied to the power-line
communication for 3-wire installations as a part of ITU G.hn
standard [2][3].

In wireless communication system, the term

"MIMO" refers to the use of multiple antennas at both the
transmitter side and receiver side. In modern usage, the term
"MIMO" refers to a practical technique regarding sending and
receiving more than one signal simultaneously over the same
radio channel by exploiting multipath propagation. MIMO Figute 1:MIMO channel

978-1-5386-5550-4/18/ $31.00 ©2018 IEEE

Here, each receiving antenna receives not only the direct
signal, but also receives a fraction of signal from other
propagation paths. Thus the channel response can be
expressed as a transmission matrix H. The direct path between
antenna 1 at the transmitter and the antenna 1 at the receiver is
denoted by the channel response h11. The direct path formed
between antenna 1 in the transmitter and antenna 2 in the
receiver is denoted as h21 and so on. Thus, the channel matrix
is of dimension N×M
The received vector y may be expressed in terms of
the channel transmission matrix H, the input vector x and the
noise vector n by the following equation:
y=Hx+n
Where the various symbols are
The response of the MIMO link is expressed as a set of linear
equations. For a 2×2 MIMO configuration, the received signal
vector is expressed as
The receiver has to solve this set of equations to find out what
was transmitted signal vector (x). The stability of the solution
depends on the condition number of the transmission matrix H
B.Modulation Technique
Digital Modulation technique provides more information
carrying capacity, high data security, quicker system
availability with a great quality communication. So, digital
modulation techniques have more demand than analog
technique, for their capacity to convey larger amounts of data.
There are many types of digital modulation techniques. In this
paper we have used the binary phase shift keying (BPSK). So
here we discuss binary phase shift keying (BPSK).
In binary phase shift keying (BPSK), the phase of
a carrier is changed according to the modulating signal or
baseband signal which is a digital signal. In BPSK, the
transmitted signal is a fixed amplitude sinusoidal signal. It
has a fixed phase when the data is at one level and when
the data is at the other level, phase is changed by 180 degree.
A Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) signal can be expressed
as
VBPSK (t)= b1 (t) √2P cos 2πfc t for 0<t<T
Where b1 (t) =+1 or -1, fc is the carrier frequency and T is the
bit duration. The signal has a power P=A2 /2, and so A=√2P,
where A represents the peak value of sinusoidal carrier.
Thus the above equation can be written as
VBPSK = ± √2P cos 2πfc t
From the figure below it is clear that the phase is changed 180
degree from 1 to 0 and 0 to 1 bit change.
The received signal has the form VBPSK= ± √2P cos(2πfc t +ɵ)
where ɵ is the phase shift introduced by the channel. Signal b1
(t) is also recovered by the demodulator.
II. SPATIAL DIVERSITY TECHNIQUE
Diversity technique is used to decrease the signal fading effect
and to improve the system performance in fading channels. In
this paper we look at spatial diversity techniques that can be
applied at the receiver side and also at the transmitter side.
Addition of multiple antennas to the transmitter or receiver
side provides a new set of independent faded paths even if the
antennas are placed by a few centimeters distance. These
additions of antennas provide a spatial diversity technique to
the system and also reduce the fading effect. Two receiving
antennas will receive twice the signal. So there is a power gain
due to multiple receiving antennas. These factors improve the
system performance at a given distance and so increase the
range.
A .Receive Diversity Technique
Consider the arrangement in Figure 2(a). One transmit
antenna at a node is sending the information to the two receive
antennas at a second node.

Figure:2(a) Receive Diversity technique
This configuration is known as a 1x2 receives diversity
system. In a real system may have more than two receive
antenna. Here we have used the maximal ratio combining
technique (MRC) for receive diversity system. Maximal-ratio
combining (MRC) is a diversity combining technique where
the signals from each channel are added together. The gain of
each channel is directly proportional to the rms signal level
and inversely proportional to the mean square noise level in
that channel.
MRC Technique
This combining process is very useful. To contend against
channel fading, this process is very good. It achieves the
best performance improvement comparing to other
methods. The MRC is most commonly used combining
method to improve performance in a noise limited
communication systems where the AWGN and the fading
are independent amongst the diversity branches. This
process is also known as pre-detection and ratio-squared
combining [5]. On the pth receiver antenna, the received
signal is,
p= hx + np
p= received symbol for the pth receive antenna
h= channel over pth receive antenna
x = transmitted symbol
th
p= noise over p receive antenna
A. Transmit diversity techniques
In the receive diversity techniques we have looked the use of a
single transmit and multiple receive antennas. There is also
transmit-side equivalents that use multiple transmit and single
receive antennas. A 2x1 figure is shown in part (b) of Figure
2.
Figure: 2(b) Transmit Diversity technique
Alamouti scheme is the basis of the Space Time Coding
technique. Here we use the alamouti scheme of two transmit
antennas and one receive antenna, i.e. (2x1) scheme.
Otherwise we also use the extended version of the alamouti
scheme, i.e. (2x2) and (4x4) scheme.
At the transmitter side, a block of two symbols is taken
from the source and sent to the modulator. After that,
Alamouti space-time encoder takes the two modulated
symbols c1 and c2 .c1 and c2 creates encoding matrix C2
where the symbols c1 and c2 are mapped to two transmit
antennas for two slots of transmit time. The encoding matrix is
given by the following equation:
Where * denotes complex conjugate.
Now if c1 is replaced by s1, c2 is replaced by s2 then the
receiver receives two received signals denoted as r1 and r2
over the two consecutive symbol periods for time slot t and t+
T. h1 (t) and h2 (t) are the fading coefficients and are assumed
constant across the two consecutive symbol transmission
periods. The received signals can be expressed by:
The maximum likelihood (ML) decoder chooses a pair of
signals (s1, s2) from the signal constellation and minimizes
the distance metric over all possible values of s1 and s2.
For phase-shift keying signals, the decision rule can be
represented by-
The combiner builds the following two combined signals that IV. TRANSFER FUNCTION OF FOUR DESIGNED
are sent to the maximum likelihood detector. MIMO CHANNELS:

We have designed four MIMO channels i.e. frequency

The space time encoder comprises of two transmit antennas as
part of the multiple input multiple output technology [6].
selective Rayleigh channels. The channels are designed
with respect to sample time, channel frequency, path
delay and path gain. The frequency response, i.e. the
transfer function of four designed MIMO channels are
plotted below-

Here, it is further extended to 4x4 diversity order system

[7].Now, consider block diagram representation of EAC
(Extended Alamouti Code) shown in figure 3. Four symbols
S1, S2, S3 & S4 are given to the STBC encoder which uses
the concept of coding and interleaving. The four symbols are
transmitted from different transmit antennas through different
paths of the same wireless channel. Similarly during second
timeslot its coded symbols S2*, S1*, S4* and S3* are being
transmitted and so on.

Figure 4: For channel 1

Figure 3: Extended (4x4) alamouti scheme

III. TOOLS FOR SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

MEASUREMENT

A. Bit Error Rate (BER):

The bit error rate (BER) is defined as the number of bit

errors per unit time. The bit error rate (also BER) is also
Figure 5: For channel 2
defined as the ratio between the numbers of bit errors to
the total number of transferred bits during a studied time
interval. Bit error ratio is a unit less performance measure,
often expressed as a percentage [8].

B. Eb/No (the energy per bit to noise power spectral

density ratio):
Eb/No is an important parameter in digital
communication system or data transmission system. It is a
normalized signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measure. It is also
known as the "SNR per bit". It is especially useful when
comparing the bit error rate (BER) performance of
different digital modulation schemes without taking
bandwidth into consideration.

Figure 6: For channel 3

 Figure 7: For channel 4

V.MODELLING THE CHANNEL EFFECTS FOR Figure 10: Output of (2x2) MIMO for channel 2
DIFFERENT MIMO SYSTEM

When the input signal of 3 GHz in Figure 8 passes through

the different designed MIMO channel, how the signal will be
affected by the channels and what will be the antenna output
for different MIMO system, i.e.(2x2),(3x3),(4x4) and (5x5)
are plotted in the following figures-

Figure 11: Output of (2x2) MIMO for channel 3

Figure 8: Input Signal

Figure 9: Output of (2x2) MIMO for channel 1 Figure 12: Output of (2x2) MIMO for channel 4
 Figure 13: Output of (3x3) MIMO for channel 1 Figure 16: Output of (3x3) MIMO for channel 4

Figure 14: Output of (3x3) MIMO for channel 2

Figure 17: Output of (4x4) MIMO for channel 1

Figure 15: Output of (3x3) MIMO for channel 3 Figure 18: Output of (4x4) MIMO for channel 2
Figure 19: Output of (4x4) MIMO for channel 3 Figure 22: Output of (5x5) MIMO for channel 2

Figure 20: Output of (4x4) MIMO for channel 4 Figure 23: Output of (5x5)MIMO for channel

Figure 24: Output of (5x5) MIMO for channel 4

VI.SIMULATION RESULT OF DIFFERENT

TRANSMITS VS. RECEIVE DIVERSITY FOR
DIFFERENT MIMO CHANNELS
Simulation result for different transmit vs. receive diversity
are plotted in the following figures. Here we use alamouti
transmit diversity for (2x1), (2x2) and (4x4) combination.
For Receive diversity we use the (1x2) and (1x4)
Figure 21: Output of (5x5) MIMO for channel 1
combination. We will see the bit error rate performance for
four designed MIMO channels for different transmit and
receive diversity techniques.

Figure 25: Transmit diversity (2x1) and Receive diversity (1x2) for different
channels
Figure 26: Transmit diversity (2x2) and Receive diversity (1x2) for different
channels
Figure 27: Transmit diversity (4x4) and Receive diversity (1x4) for different
channels
VII.CONCLUSION
From the above figures we see the following observations.
Fading is the attenuation of signal power with the distance.
Signal amplitude is related with the signal power by the
equation, Pout =A2out /2 where Pout= signal output power
and A2out = signal amplitude.
For (2x2) MIMO system we see that, the amplitude of 2nd
antenna is peak for channel 2 and amplitude of 1st antenna is
peak for channel 3 i.e. the signal fading is minimized. For
channel 1 and channel 4 the amplitudes of both 1st and 2nd
antenna are average. For (3x3) MIMO system we see that for
channel 1, channel 3 and channel 4 the 3rd antenna amplitude
is large i.e. the input signal is less faded or destroyed except
channel 2. For channel 2 the 2nd antenna amplitude is large.
For (4x4) MIMO system for channel 3 the 4th antenna output
is peak i.e. signal power is high so signal fading is minimum.
For channel 4 the 2nd antenna output is large. For channel 1 1st
antenna output and for channel 2 3rd antenna output is
maximum. For (5x5) MIMO system we see that for channel 1,
channel 3 and channel 4, 3rd antenna output is maximum. For
channel 2, 1st antenna output is maximum. So from the above
figures we can analyze how the signal fading is randomly
changed when an input signal from different transmitters
passes through different MIMO channels. We can also analyze
the bit error rate for different diversity techniques from the
figures (figure 25, figure 26, and figure 27). The receive
diversity always gives the best result than transmit diversity.
Here we see that for channel 3i.e for 300 HZ the receive
diversity (1x2) gives the best result for BER.
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