Experimental Evaluation of MIMO-OFDM System with Rateless Space-Time Block Code

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless technology in combination with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) is an attractive technique for next-generation wireless systems. However, the performance of wireless links is severely degraded due to various channel impairments which cause a decoding failure and lead to packet loss at the receiver. One technique to cope with this problem is the rateless space-time block code (RSTBC). This paper presents experimental results on the performance of a 2×2 MIMO-OFDM system with RSTBC as measured in a testbed implemented with field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The average bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated experimentally, and the results agree closely with simulation and analytical upper bound. It has been shown that RSTBC can be implemented in real-world scenarios and guarantee the reliability of loss-prone wireless channels.