Implementation of orthogonal space time coding to gain ultimate bandwidth efficiency at higher bitrate is an attractive choice to exploit the capability of Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) system in wireless faded environment. The paper presents a suitable mathematical model to evaluate the performance of such a receiver under Zero Forcing (ZF) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) schemes for two different configurations of 2 x 2 and 3 x 3 MIMO structures. The model has been tested to evaluate the performance of 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation schemes to establish the superior performance of SVD scheme over ZF especially at low SNR. The paper also reports comparative performance of Symbol Error Rate (SER) with respect to SNR for QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM schemes to understand the qualitative and quantitative inferences for a suitable practical design.

Wireless communication performance is governed by the channel environment, as the overall capacity of the serving technology is basically limited by the channel characteristics. The development of wireless communication system in the past decades aimed at the effective utilization of the resources to yield improved performance at the increased data rate to meet the need of the modern information and communication technology (Naguib et al., 1998). With the introduction of space as a degree of freedom along with the time and frequency, the network performance has improved in terms of various aspects like data rate, total user capacity, efficiency in fading environment, etc. This technique is termed as antenna diversity or space diversity. The important technique which provided a next major leap for wireless communication system is the use of multiple antennas at transmitter and receiver called Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) system (Bölcskei et al., 2002). This provides more number of links between the source and destination at the same time over the same frequency band. The basic idea of MIMO system is to effectively utilize these links for improved data rate and system performance in terms of less Symbol Error Rate (SER) (equivalently bit error rate) in a large fading environment.

Telecommunications Journal, Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO), QAM, Zero Forcing (ZF), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), Rayleigh fading channel, Symbol Error Rate (SER), CSI.