Estimation of STBC-MIMO Radio Channel at 2.4 GHz in Underground Mine Gallery

This paper investigates the radio link performance of wireless system combining multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and space time block coding (STBC) techniques, while implementing the least-squares (LS) and the minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimators based on time domain channel statics with pilot symbols arrangement. The key feature of this work is to study such an issue in Wireless Underground Communication (WUC) for SISO (single-input single-output), MISO (multiple-input single-output) and MIMO channels. The MIMO-STBC underground system performance degradation due to the application of LS and MMSE estimators is compared for the three underground channel cases, by measuring the bit error rate (BER) with different modulation schemes.