Bit error rate analysis of various BLAST wireless MIMO systems

BLAST is a wireless mobile communication approach that makes use of multi-element antennas at both transmitter and receiver end to achieve transmission rates which is far in excess of those possible using some traditional approaches. In wireless systems, multipath is traditionally viewed as a serious impairment. Using the BLAST approach however, it is possible to exploit multipath, that is, to use the scattering characteristics of the propagation environment to the benefit of wireless systems to increase the system capacity. This paper presents the performance comparison of different BLAST architectures in wireless communications with the help of computer simulation experiments. The research study illustrates that the Turbo-BLAST configuration yields best system performance. Also, the bit-error-rate performance of both VBLAST and Turbo-BLAST improves with a decreasing number of transmit antennas, with Turbo-BLAST outperforming V-BLAST. In addition, for BLAST performance, a significant gain in bit-error-rate performance is attained with smaller number of transmit antennas. © 2012 by Begell House, Inc.