Doppler Effect in 2 × 2 to 4 × 4 Mimo Systems of Wireless Communication with Orthogonal Pilot Channel Estimation

The Doppler effect in 2×2, 3×3, 4×4 MIMO wireless communication systems with channel estimation is studied. The orthogonal pilot signal approach is used for the channel estimation, where the Hadamard sequences are used for piloting, along with the eight alternative orthogonal sets similar to the Walsh set. MIMO transmissions are simulated for 10 cases of the frame length and pilot symbols per frame by no Doppler shift to 1100 Hz Doppler shift with a step of 100 Hz. Based on the simulation, it is ascertained that MIMO transmissions of shorter frames are less sensitive to the Doppler effect. Despite increasing the number of antennas does not mitigate the Doppler effect, and the bit-error rate performance of 4×4 MIMO systems worsens faster than that of 2×2 MIMO systems, it is better to use the maximum number of antennas. The Doppler effect does badly worsen the performance at highway and express train speeds (100 km/hr, and faster), leaving only possibility to further shorten transmissions. This, however, decreases the data rate, but the respective accuracy-versus-data-rate tradeoff must be acceptable.