Joint BLAST-STTC for MIMO-OFDM System

— This study focuses on improving MIMO-OFDM systems by combining a wireless communication architecture known as vertical BLAST(bell laboratories layered space-time) or V-BLAST and STTC(space time trellis coding). In this paper, the combination is done by introducing STTC in each V-BLAST layer. Moreover, this architecture uses multiple antennas that are grouped into small number of antennas which makes it less complex to decode by decoding every group. Whereas, in traditional V-BLAST, all the antennas form one group and they are decoded together at the receiver, therefore, this increases the complexity as the number of antennas is getting high. We compare the bit error rate performance of this system with MIMO-OFDM that uses convolutional coding instead of STTC. Under the same spectral efficiency, the simulation results prove that joining V-BLAST with STTC improves MIMO-OFDM systems performance.