Dual Hop MIMO OSTBC Communication over Rayleigh-Rician Channel

This paper investigates orthogonal space-time block coded transmission for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel with non-coherent amplify-and-forward relaying in a situation where the source-relay and relay-destination channels undergo Rayleigh and Rician fading respectively. Fading coefficients of the Rician channel are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. We derive exact expressions for the moment generating function, first and second moments of the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio at the destination to statistically characterize the system behavior. We then analyze the system performance by deriving new analytical expressions for the bit error rate and amount of fading. These performance metrics reveal that strong line of sight components between relay-destination link always limit the performance promised by MIMO scattering environment when both nodes have multiple antennas.