Performance Analysis of Rate-Adaptive Modulation with Imperfect Estimation in Space–Time Coded MIMO System

Based on the imperfect estimation information, the performance analysis of multi-input multi-out (MIMO) systems with rate-adaptive modulation and space–time coding over flat Rayleigh fading channels is presented in this paper. The fading gain value is partitioned into a number of regions by which the modulation is adapted according to the region the fading gain falls in. Under a target bit error rate (BER) and constant power constraint, the fading gain region boundaries are given. By utilizing the minimum mean squared error estimation, the correlation between the channel gains and their estimates, which contributes to imperfect channel information, is evaluated. With this correlation, the probability density function of fading gain is obtained. Based on these results, the closed-form expressions for the SE and average BER are derived in detail, respectively. The theoretical expressions will be more accurate than the existing schemes, and they include perfect estimation as a special case. Numerical results show that the SE and BER of the system with imperfect estimation are worse than those with perfect estimation due to the estimation error. Moreover, the simulation results for SE and BER are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.