Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing

The fundamental performance limits of space-time block code (STBC) designs when perfect channel information is available at the transmitter (CSIT) are studied in this report. With CSIT, the transmitter can perform various techniques such as rate adaption, power allocation, or beamforming. Previously, the exploration of these fundamental results assumed long-term constraints, for example, channel codes can have infinite decoding delay, and power or rate is normalized over infinite channel-uses. With long-term constraints, the transmitter can operate at the rate lower than the instantaneous mutual information and error-free transmission can be supported. In this report, we focus on the performance limits of short-term behavior for STBC systems. We assume that the system has block power constraint, block rate constraint, and finite decoding delay. With these constraints, although the transmitter can perform rate adaption, power control, or beamforming, we show that decoding-error is unavoidable. In the high SNR regime, the diversity gain is upperbounded by the product of the number of transmit antennas, receive antennas, and independent fading block channels that messages spread over. In other words, fading cannot be completely combatted with short-term constraints. The proof is based on a sphere-packing argument.