International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386)

Volume 1 No 3 May 2011

http://www.ijsat.com

PERFORMANCE OF MIMO-OFDM SYSTEM FOR

RAYLEIGH FADING CHANNEL
Pallavi Bhatnagar1, Jaikaran Singh2, Mukesh Tiwari3
Department of Electronics & Communication,
Sri Satya Sai Institute of Science &Technology,
Sehore, MP (India)
pallavi_sx@rediffmail.com1, jksingh81@yahoo.co.in2, tiwari_mukesh79@yahoo.in3

Abstract- This paper proposes a simple and efficient

simulation method for MIMO-OFDM system with channel
equalization.BPSK modulation is used to detect the behavior
of the Rayleigh fading channel in presence of additive white
Gaussian noise and then its performance is evaluated.
Obtained result is then compared with adding MLSE
equalizer. This paper shows that the addition of equalizer
reduces the BER (Bit Error Rate) and the channel output
becomes more pronounced. Though the total channel is a
frequency selective channel, the channel experienced by each
subcarrier in an OFDM system is a flat fading channel with
each subcarrier getting independent Rayleigh fading.

tive solution to improve communication quality,

performance, capacity, and transmission rate. MIMOOFDM is under intensive investigation by researchers.

Fig 1. Block diagram of MIMO

Keywords- MIMO system, channel, equalization, Rayleigh
fading.

Fig 1. Block diagram

I. INTRODUCTION
The rising demand of multimedia services and the
development of Internet related contents lead to increasing
curiosity to high speed communications. In the ceaseless
search for increased capacity in a wireless communication
channel it has been shown that by using MIMO (Multiple
Input Multiple Output) system architecture it is possible to
increase that capacity considerably. The combination
MIMO-OFDM is very likely and beneficial since OFDM
enables support of more antennas and larger bandwidths
since it simplifies equalization in MIMO systems.
Usually fading is considered as a problem in wireless
communication but MIMO channels uses the fading to
increase the capacity of entire system. Fading of the signal
can be mitigated by different diversity techniques.

We consider the system where the transmitter has

antennas and theofreceiver
has n r antennas. Let
MIMO system

hm,n be a

complex number corresponding to the channel gain between

transmit antenna n and the receive antenna m. If at a certain
time

instant

complex

signals

x1 , x2 ,..., xnt are

nt antennas, the received signals at

transmitted via the

antenna m can be expressed as

nt

y m hm,n xn em
n 1

where

em is a noise signal. This relation is easily expressed

in a matrix structure. Let x and y be

nt and n r vectors

containing the transmitter and receiver data, respectively.

Define the following

II.

nt

n r x nt channel gain matrix

h1,1 .........h1, nt

OVERVIEW OF MIMO- OFDM SYSTEM

H=
...................

The MIMO system transmits different signals from

each transmit element so that the receiving antenna array
receives a superposition of all the transmitted signals. All
signals are transmitted from all elements once and the
receiver solves a linear equation system to demodulate the
message. Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system is an effe-

hnr,1 .......hnr, nt

International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386)

Volume 1 No 3 May 2011

http://www.ijsat.com

Then we have,
where e =

y = Hx + e

IV. SNR VERSUS BIT ENERGY-TO-NOISE

DENSITY RATIO

(3)

e1 .......enr T is a vector of noise samples.

Key tool for increasing the transmission rate with

several transmitting antennas system consist of
transmitting more independent streams, or layers
of data from all available transmit antennas, all
together. In more precise terms, if we have a system
with P transmit antennas, we can transmit
simultaneously, Pt independent symbols one from
each t transmit antenna. At the receiver, we can get, at
any time instant Pr observations one from each
receive antenna. Therefore at any time instant, we
have a system of Pr observations in Pt unknowns.

To make a fair performance evaluation of

systems with, e.g., different coding schemes or
modulation schemes in terms of received energy
per bit, the error-rate performance is given as
function of the bit energy-to-noise density ratio
Eb/N0. Whereas for wireless communication system
simulations, in general, the SNR at the receive
antenna is used as input parameter. Let Es/N0
denote the SNR per sample at the input of the
RX baseband processing. Then, clearly, there is
a relation between Eb/N0 and Es/N0. The
baseband processing of a MIMO transmission
system consists of a number of subsequent
blocks that have an influence on the relation
between Eb/N0 and Es/N0.
-

The encoder with coding rate R (R < 1),

- The spatial mapper that maps Pt symbols on Pt

transmit antennas,
And the modulation block that maps m bits
onto a 2m-ary modulation scheme.

Fig 2. Block diagram of MIMO OFDM system

Now, assume that the communication between

transmitter and receiver is scaled such that the
variance of the propagation attenuation is c2 = 1.
When Rb = 1/Tb denotes the bit rate and Ts the
symbol duration, in general, the relation between
Eb/N0 and Es/N0 is given by

III. FLAT RAYLEIGH FADING MODEL

Eb

The propagating radio signals are affected by the

physical channel in various ways. To specify a
situation of frequency-flat Rayleigh fading, a model
is introduced called flat Rayleigh fading model.
This is a reference model, which can be
conceived of as a simplification of heavy
scattering occurring locally only. Fast fading
component has Rayleigh density function if there is
no direct path from signaling parts. Rayleigh
distribution is as follows,

N0

r
r2
2 exp 2 0 r
PRayleigh (r )
2
0
r 0,

Es Tb

(5)

N 0 Ts

Given this equation, the relation between Eb/N0

and Es/N0 can be determined. For an encoder with
coding rate R, it can be shown that Ts = RTb, thus,

Es
N0

=R

Eb

N0

Pb=1/2[1-
The BER
for BPSK{in(Eab/N
Rayleigh
fading
channel
is
0) / (Eb/N
0) +1}]
defined
as

To model uncorrelated frequency-flat Rayleigh

fading, H is defined as an Nr Nt dimensional
matrix, denoted by Hiid and having i.i.d. zero-mean,
circularly-symmetric complex Gaussian elements
with a variance of one.

Sending Pt bits parallel on Pt transmit antennas

reflects on the relation between Ts and Tb as
follows: Ts = PtTb. Maximum likelihood
sequence estimation (MLSE) seeks to estimate the
data sequence which is most likely to have been
sent given the received signal vector.
38

International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386)

Volume 1 No 3 May 2011

http://www.ijsat.com
VII. CONCLUSION

V. MLSE EQUALIZATION
In a single-carrier frequency-selective Rayleigh
fading environment, assuming a time-invariant
channel impulse response (CIR), the received
symbols are described by
L1

pk = hj skj + nk

In this paper, performance of MIMO OFDM is

characterized with low complexity. The Rayleigh
distribution assumes that there are a sufficiently
large number of equal power multipath components
with different and independent phase. On basis of
the simulated results, it was concluded that the
structure has low bit error rate when MLSE
equalizer is used. It is shown through numerical
simulations that high performance gain is achieved
in equalized MIMO OFDM system.

j=0

VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
where sk denotes the kth complex symbol in the
transmitted sequence of N symbols chosen from an
alphabet u containing M complex symbols, pk is the
kth received symbol, nk is the kth Gaussian noise
sample g(0, 2), and hj is the jth coefficient of the
estimated CIR. The equalizer is accountable for
reversing the outcome of the Channel on the
transmitted symbols in order to produce the
sequence of transmitted symbols with maximum
equalizes
assurance.

VI. SIMULATION RESULTS

Simulation result shows the bit error rate (BER)
of MIMO- OFDM system, with two transmits and
one receive antenna over a Rayleigh fading with
additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. It
is noticeable that the bit error rate reduces as the
signal to noise ratio increases. After zero on x-axis,
this BER decreases rapidly with Eb/No.By using
MLSE equalizer, it performs much better.

I would like to thank Sri Satya Sai Institute of

Science and Technology and the Department of
Electronics and communication engineering for
taking the time to discuss and demonstrate the
equalization technology with me. Also, for
providing very helpful comments on this paper.
IX. REFERENCES
[1] Paulraj, A.J., Gore, D.A., Nabar, R.U., Blcskei,
H
(2004).-An
overview
of
MIMO
communications. - a key to gigabit wireless,
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[2] A.Adjoudani, et al, "Prototype experience
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[3] D. Agrawal, V. Tarokh, A. Naguib, and N.
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[4] S.M.
Alamouti, "A
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[5] J. B. Andersen, "Array gain and capacity for

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Fig.3 BER performance of MIMO-OFDM system

with MLSE equalizer

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International Journal of Science and Advanced Technology (ISSN 2221-8386)

Volume 1 No 3 May 2011

http://www.ijsat.com

[6] Krishna Sankar, BER for BPSK in OFDM with

Rayleigh multipath channel on August 26, 2008
http://www.dsplog.com/2008/08/26/ofdm-rayleighchannel-ber-bpsk/
[7] Khalida Noori, Sami Ahmed Haider, A Layered
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Journal of Digital Information Management _Volume 5
Number 6 December 2007

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