Performance Analysis of A Trellis Coded

Beamforming Scheme for MIMO Fading Channels

L. Chu, Student Member, IEEE

J. Yuan, Member, IEEE

School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia
li.chu@student.unsw.edu.au

School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia
jinhong@ee.unsw.edu.au

Abstract --- This paper presents a trellis coded beamforming

scheme for MIMO fading channels. We propose that if the
channel state information is available at the transmitter and
the coded signals are weighted with the relevant channel
information before transmission, the system with single
receiver antenna can actually achieve full transmit diversity
and coding gain, without the complex design of space-time
codes. The error performances of such schemes over fast and
slow Rayleigh fading channels are derived. It is shown that on
fast Rayleigh fading channel, the code effective length and the
product distances should be maximized to achieve higher
performance gain, while on slow Rayleigh fading channel, the
minimum squared Euclidean distance between the pairwise
sequences should be maximized. Furthermore, we show that
this trellis coded beamforming scheme outperforms the spacetime trellis coded beamforming schemes. Simulation on slow
and fast Rayleigh fading channels has been conducted and they
match with the theoretically calculated upper bounds very
closely.

Rayleigh fading channels, the minimum squared Euclidean

distance between the pair-wise sequences should be
maximized, which means the conventional TCM designed
for AWGN channels can be applied directly for the proposed
coded beamforming scheme over MIMO slow fading
channels. While for fast Rayleigh fading channels, the
product of the branch squared Euclidean distances, and the
effective code length should be maximized, which means the
conventional TCM designed for Rayleigh fading channels
can be used with beamforming over MIMO fast Rayleigh
fading channels. Moreover, the system with single receiver
antenna can achieve full transmit diversity gain and coding
gain, without the complex design of space-time codes.

I. INTRODUCTION
In a wireless communication channel, signals take
different paths to travel from the transmitter to the receiver,
which causes the signal heavily attenuated at the receiver. In
order to compensate this effect of multi-path fading, people
introduce techniques to provide coding and diversity gains
[1].
Transmitter and receiver diversities are techniques
widely used in wireless communication to combat the severe
effect of fading. Practically, space-time codes [1, 3] are
invented to achieve diversity and coding gains. In order to
achieve good performance, usually the design complexity
and the computation cost of space-time codes are relatively
high.
In this paper, we consider a simple trellis coded
beamforming schemes for MIMO fading channels.
Beamforming scheme is a closed-loop approach, which
suggests that the channel state information could be obtained
at the transmitter through a feedback link from the receiver
[2], if the channel is changing slowly.
Based on the performance analysis, we formulate the
optimum code design criteria. It is shown that for slow
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC)
Discovery project and the University of New South Wales of Australia
Faculty Research Grant.

0-7803-8887-9/05/$20.00 (c)2005 IEEE

The system model is presented in section II. The upper

bounds of the error performance for the system over fast and
slow Rayleigh fading channels are shown in section III. The
simulation of such scheme is conducted over slow and fast
fading channels and the results are shown and discussed in
Section IV. Section V concludes this chapter.
II.SYSTEM MODEL
We consider a MIMO system with nT transmitter and nR
receiver antennas. The information data is encoded by a
TCM encoder. The encoded sequence is denoted as
X t = ( x 1 , " , x L ) , where xt is the coded symbol at time t
and L is the length of one frame. The fading channel matrix
at time t is defined as

h 1t ,1
t
h
= 2 ,1
#
h nt ,1
R

h 1t, 2

"

t
2 ,2

"

h nt R , 2

"

h 1t, n T

h 2t , n T

#
t
h n R , n T

(1)

where, hnt , n is the channel coefficient from transmitter

R T
antenna nT to receiver antenna nR .
Let

A = H t* H t

(2)

where ( ) denotes conjugate transpose. Let max be the

maximum eigenvalue of A . We choose the nT 1
beamforming vector Wt as the orthonormal eigenvector

i,m

where

(3)

where ( ) denotes transpose. The transmitted symbol at

time t from each transmit antenna is

S t = Wt X t

(4)

nR ( nT +nR )i 2i

1
p Xt , X t =
2 i=1

corresponding to max , in order to maximize the received

signal to noise ratio [4]. We denote this vector as

Wt = w1 , w2 ," , wnT

1 2
l

L
L

Es et
Es et

m 2l

di,m 1 1+ t =1 4l 1+ t=1

4Noi l=0 l
4Noi

m=nT nR

m !C
nR
i m +1
j=1

coefficients of e
max .

iu

(n R
m

pb ( e)
(5)

where N t is the nR 1 additive white Gaussian noise vector.

We assume that the channel state information can be
perfectly recovered at both transmitter and receiver. The
receiver applies maximum likelihood detector to estimate the
transmitted signal sequence.

III.ERROR PERFORMANCE ON FAST RAYLEIGH

FADING CHANNELS

, and

Ci ,m is the

in the probability density function of

1
B( Xt , X t )p Xt , X t
k Xt Xt

(9)

where k is the error event length of the code, and B ( X t , X t )

is the number of bits in error from X t to X t .
In order to get insight into the code design for the trellis
coded beamforming scheme, we now consider the upper
bound of the pair-wise error probability, which is derived
and given by
1 n R ( nT + nR )i 2 i
p X t , X t

L
2 i =1 m = nT nR
E s et

t =1
i +
4No

A. Slow Rayleigh fading channel

In this section, we assume that the symbols are
transmitted over a slow Rayleigh fading channel. According
to maximum likelihood decoding scheme, the pair-wise error
probability (PEP) conditioned on the channel matrix Ht can

i,m

j ) ! ( n T j )!

With the exact pair-wise error probabilities, we can derive

the upper bound of the bit error rate, which is given by

Then the symbol at the receiver end is

Rt = H t St + Nt

(8)

m !C i , m

m +1

nR

( n R j ) ! ( nT j ) !
j =1

(10)

For the special case when nR = 1 , is the weighting coefficient

for transmitting antenna i is given by

be computed as
ES 2
p X t , X t | H t = Q
d h X t , X t
2 NO

with

e t = x t x t

(h

(7)

t =1

i
t

(6)

where Q (.) is the Q-function, and Es No is the ratio of the

signal energy to the noise power spectral density, and the
modified Euclidean distance between X t and X t is

dh2 X t , X t = max et

i
t

(11)

j = 1

where (.) denotes the complex conjugate, and hti , i = 1,..., n

th

are the channel fading coefficients for the path from the i
transmit antenna to the receive antenna at time t . Then
upper bound of the PEP can be simplified into
Es
1
p X t , X t 1 +
2
4No

t =1

et

nT

(12)

Using the method introduced in [4, 5], we derive the closed

form of the exact PEP, which is given by

From (12), we can see that the proposed scheme with single
receiver antenna can achieve full transmit diversity over slow
Rayleigh fading channels, without the complicated space-

B. Fast Rayleigh fading channel

Now we consider the case of fast Rayleigh fading
channel. For a system works over a fast Rayleigh fading
channel, the channel statistics for each time slot changes. We
derived the average upper bound for the PEP, which is given
by

10

2T2R -- simulation
2T2R -- theoretical
4T2R -- simulation
4T2R -- theoretical
-1

10

-2

Bit Error Probability

time code design. Furthermore, in order to achieve a low

error probability, the minimum squared Euclidean distance
between the pair-wise sequences should be maximized. In
other words, the conventional TCM designed for AWGN
channels can be used with beamforming over MIMO slow
fading channels, while the beamforming provides the
diversity gain and the TCM designed for AWGN channels
offers an optimum coding gain.

10

-3

10

-4

10

-5

10

-8

-6

-4

-2

0
SNR(dB)

Fig. 1 Comparison between simulation results and theoretically calculated upper bounds

m!Ci,m
1 L nR ( nT +nR )i2i
p Xt , X t
2 t =1 i=1 m=nT nR E e m+1 nR

s t
i +
( nR j )!( nT j ) !
4No j =1

(13)

For the special case when n R = 1 , the average upper bound

of the PEP can be simplified into
Ee
1 L
p X t , X t 1 + s t
2 t =1
4No

nT

Fig. 1 compares the simulation results with the upper

bounds derived based on Equation (9). The upper two curves
show the BER of systems with 2 transmitter and 2 receiver
antennas. The lower two curves show the BER of systems
with 4 transmitter and 2 receiver antennas. From the figure, it
is clear that the simulation results match the upper bound
very closely.

(14)

It can be seen that, for the systems with single receiver

antenna, full transmit diversity can be achieved without the
complex design of space-time codes. It is also clear that this
introduced scheme can provide coding gain, which is
determined by the product of the branch squared Euclidean
distances along the error event path. In order to achieve
lower error probability, the product of the branch squared
Euclidean distances, and the effective code length should be
maximized. In other words, the conventional TCM designed
for Rayleigh fading channels can be used with beamforming
over MIMO fast Rayleigh fading channels, while the
beamforming provides the diversity gain and the TCM
designed for Rayleigh fading channels offers an optimum
coding gain.
IV.SIMULATION RESULTS
The performance of the proposed scheme on slow and
fast Rayleigh fading channels is evaluated by simulation in
this section. In the simulation, the frame size is 130 symbols.
It is assumed that both the transmitter and the receiver have
the perfect CSI. The frame error rate (FER) and the bit error
rate (BER) curves are plotted against the signal-to-noise
ratio.

10

2 Tx
4 Tx
6 Tx
8 Tx

-1

10

-2

10

-3

Average BEP

10

-4

10

-5

10

-6

10

-7

10

-8

-6

-4

-2

2
SNR(dB)

10

12

Fig. 2 Upper bounds for systems with one and two receiver antennas

Fig. 2 shows the theoretical upper bounds for systems

with 1 and 2 receiver antennas. 2, 4, 6 and 8 transmitter
antennas are used. The dotted lines are the upper bounds of
systems with 1 receiver antenna, while the solid lines
represent the upper bounds of systems with 2 receiver
antennas. With these theoretically generated upper bounds,
we can easily verify the performance of the system without
the tedious simulation. From the upper bounds, it is clear that
the system performance improves as the number of

10

10

22slow
22fast
42slow
42fast

trellis code without beamforming

STTC with beamforming
uncoded beamforming
trellis code with beamforming
-1

-2

10

FER

Bit Error Probability

10

-1

10

10

-3

10

-2
-4

10

-5

10

10

-3

12

13

14

15

16
17
SNR(dB)

18

19

20

21

-6

10

-8

-6

-4

-2

0
SNR(dB)

Fig. 4 Comparison of performance over slow and fast fading channels

Fig. 3 Performance comparison of 4-state codes

transmitter antennas increases. It is also clear that the

increase in the number of the receiver antenna also improves
the system performance.
Fig. 3 compares the FER of 4-state trellis code with
beamforming, 4-state trellis code without beamforming, 4stated space-time trellis code constructed in [3] with
beamforming, and the uncoded beamforming scheme. In the
simulation, we use two transmit antennas and one receiver
antenna. It can be seen that the proposed scheme achieves
the best performance among all. From the comparison
between the proposed scheme and the space-time trellis
coded beamforming scheme, we can see that the proposed
scheme can achieve much better performance than the spacetime trellis coded beamforming scheme. This is due to that
the space-time trellis code is designed for an open-loop
system; and it is not optimal when it is combined with
beamforming in the close-loop systems. In addition, the
beamforming already achieves full-diversity gain. Hence,
there is no need to use the space-time trellis codes. In this
case, the simple conventional trellis codes are more suitable
to achieve optimum coding gains, and also, this scheme has
lower design complexity.
Fig. 4 compares the system performance over slow and
fast fading channel. The upper two curves show the
performance of system with 2 transmitter and 2 receiver
antennas, while the lower two curves show the performance
of system with 4 transmitter and 2 receiver antennas. In both
cases, it is showed that the system performance over fast
fading channel is better than that over slow fading channel.
For fast fading channel, the channel coefficients change from
time to time, while for slow fading channel, the channel
coefficients remain the same for the same frame. This means
fast fading channel actually introduces extra diversity gain.
Thats why the BER curves over fast fading channel have
deeper slop than the BER curves over slow fading channel,
hence introduce better performance.

V.CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we considered a trellis coded beamforming
scheme over MIMO fading channels, assuming the channel
state information is available at the transmitter. Our derived
upper bounds show that system of single receiver antenna
with this scheme can achieve full transmit diversity gain and
coding gain, without the complex design of space-time
coding. We also derive the design criteria for the proposed
scheme in order to achieve best performance.
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[1]

B. Vucetic and J. Yuan, Space-time Coding, John Wiley & Sons

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[2]

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[3]

V.Tarokh, N.Seshadri and A.R.Calderbank, Space-Time Codes for

High Data RateWireless Communication: Performance Criterion and
Code Construction, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory. Vol.44, No.2,
Mar.1998.

[4]

D. Divsalar and M. K. Simon, The Design of trellis coded MPSK for

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[5]

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