The diversity gain of transmit diversity in wireless systems with Rayleigh fading

In this paper, we study the ability of transmit diversity to provide diversity benefit to a receiver in a Rayleigh fading environment. With transmit diversity, multiple antennas transmit delayed versions of a signal to create frequency-selective fading at a single antenna at the receiver, which uses equalization to obtain diversity gain against fading. We use Monte Carlo simulation to study transmit diversity for the case of independent Rayleigh fading from each transmit antenna to the receive antenna and maximum likelihood sequence estimation for equalization at the receiver. Our results show that transmit diversity with M transmit antennas provides a diversity gain within 0.1 dB of that with M receive antennas for any number of antennas. Thus, we can obtain the same diversity benefit at the remotes and base stations using multiple base-station antennas only.