On the performance of space-time codes over spatially correlated Rayleigh fading channels

We derive the exact pairwise error probability (PEP) for space-time coding over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of spatial fading correlation. We show that receive correlation always degrades the PEP for all signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We quantify the effect of receive correlation by employing the notion of "majorization." We show that the stronger the receive correlation, the worse the PEP for all SNRs. We show that at low SNR, depending on the codes, transmit correlation can either improve or degrade the PEP performance. We show that to guarantee robust performance for arbitrary transmit correlation, the minimum eigenvalue of the codeword pair difference matrix should be maximized among all codeword pairs.