compare the error rate performance of the stacked OSTBC with spatial multiplexing (SM) and full-diversity achieving schemes. Finally, we illustrate the theoretical results by numerical simulations.'
author:
- 'Aydin Sezgin,  and Oliver Henkel, [^1][^2] [^3]'
title: 'Stacked OSTBC: Error Performance and Rate Analysis '
---

Introduction
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Recent information theoretic results have demonstrated that the ability of a system to support a high link quality and higher data rates in the presence of Rayleigh fading improves significantly with the use of multiple transmit and receive antennas [@Telatar99; @FoschiniGans98]. Since then there has been considerable work on a variety of schemes [@TirkHotWichBuch] which exploit multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver in order to either obtain transmit and receive diversity and therefore increase the reliability of the system, e.g., orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBC) and space-time trellis codes [@TarokhSeCa98; @Alamouti; @TarokhJafarkCalder99] or achieve the theoretical bounds [@Foschini96] derived in [@Telatar99; @FoschiniGans98]. Interested readers are referred to [@TirkHotWichBuch], where a detailed analysis of different schemes is given.

The performance of OSTBC with respect to mutual information has been analyzed (among others) in [@HassibiHoch2002; @Paulraj; @Sandhu; @Bauch] and it was shown that the capacity is achieved only in the case of $n_T=2$ 