Performance comparison of space-time block and trellis codes in the MIMO land mobile satellite channels

Due to the crowded orbits and shortage of frequency resources, the use of MIMO technology to improve spectrum efficiency and an increase of the capacity have become a necessary trend of broadband satellite communication. Firstly, we analyze the main influenced factors and compare the bit error rate (BER) performance of space-time block code (STBC) scheme and space-time trellis code (STTC) scheme. Then we build up the model of land mobile satellite (LMS) channel under different environments by using 3-state Markov chain. This paper emphatically studies the BER performance of STTC and STBC in the MIMO satellite channel. The main emphasis is placed on the effects of different factors, such as terminal environment and elevation angles, on the BER performance of STBC and STTC schemes. Simulation results indicate that performance of STTC in Rayleigh channel is obviously improved with the increasing number of transmitting and receiving antennas, but the encoder state has little impact on the performance. In the Rayleigh channel, the performance of Alamouti code is better than that of STTC. In the LMS channel, performance of these two kinds of space-time coding in open area is optimal, and in the urban area it is the worst. Nevertheless, performance of STTC is slightly superior to the performance of STBC under different circumstances. Under the same environmental conditions, BER of STBC and STTC reduces with the increase of the satellite altitude angle, and therefore, the BER curves of STTC fall faster.