Outage capacity comparison of multi-layered STBC and V-BLAST systems

In this paper, we examine the capacity of high data rate open loop MIMO architectures. The focus of the study is to compare the information capacity of multi-layered space time block coded (MLSTBC) systems with V-BLAST and STBCs. MLSTBC combines transmit diversity and spatial multiplexing. The single user data are divided into layers of information and each layer is encoded with a STBC. The result of this study shows that for the same number of transmit-receive antennas, MLSTBC is more power efficient than V-BLAST, since it provides more diversity. Furthermore, at low SNRs and low outage probabilities, MLSTBC is more spectrally efficient. Thus, it is more suitable for low power high data rate wireless applications.