Umudike Journal of Engineering and Technology

Antenna diversity techniques in wireless communication systems are presented in this research, focusing on Alamouti Space-Time Block Codes (STBC). These techniques utilize multiple transmitting and receiving antennas to achieve spatial diversity, mitigate signal fade, and increase the data rate transmission without the need for additional bandwidth channels. The research conducted performance evaluations for various configurations with two transmit antennas and one, two, and four receive antennas over a Rayleigh fading channel. The results demonstrated that by employing multiple transmit antennas and space-time block coding, outstanding performance can be achieved even under the impact of channel fading by more than 10%. The signal detection algorithm used in this technique was based on a maximum likelihood detector, a prediction approach which successfully received the original data from the received signals on the receiving antennas (M). The findings revealed that increasing the number of receiving antennas improved the system's performance, as it reduced the error probability by 10 percent of the system by receiving multiple copies of the transmitted data. Specifically, at 9 dB SNR, there was a 10 percent increase in error reduction for the signal transmitted through the Rayleigh channel. From a channel capacity perspective, the research showcased that multiple antennas had the potential to significantly enhance the achievable data rates, effectively transforming wireless channels from narrow to wide data channels. Space-time block codes (STBC) played a crucial role in realizing these gains by introducing temporal and spatial correlations into the transmitted signals from different antennas, all while maintaining the total transmitted power and transmission bandwidth.