Adaptive Switching Hybrid Blast-STBC MIMO System

Abstract

Fading in a wireless channel has negative effects on the performance of communication systems. Bell Laboratories layered space-time (BLAST) has been used to get a high data rate while space-time block codes (STBC) have been used to get a low bit error rate (BER) performance. Under deep faded channels, hybrid BLAST-STBC systems are considered as a trade-off between BLAST and STBC systems. By exploiting the benefits of both systems, a new method to represent a 4 × 4 multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) system is proposed and studied, in which the transmission process is carried out adaptively between both 4 × 4 VBLAST, Quasi-Orthogonal STBC (QOSTBC) and Hybrid systems according to the transmit links state. The proposed adaptive switching hybrid system (ASHS) reduces the total transmitted power, achieves the maximum throughput by obtaining the best BER. An adaptive switching transmission scheme using the strategy of measuring the transmit links fading is investigated as well. The simulated results are obtained in an environment of a 4 × 4 MIMO system using MATLAB platform where the total transmitting power is normalized to unity. The detections are done using the maximum likelihood (ML) receiver. The proposed ASHS system shows a lot of advantages such as maximum throughput is obtained in bad channel states, no additional transmit power is needed and no additional bandwidth is needed. Finally, under deep fading condition, the proposed ASHS transmission scheme obtains the best BER, reduces wasting the total transmitted power, achieves the maximum throughput and obtains the best BER.