High-rate codes that are linear in space and time

Multiple-antenna systems that operate at high rates require simple yet effective space-time transmission schemes to handle the large traffic volume in real time. At rates of tens of bits per second per hertz, Vertical Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST), where every antenna transmits its own independent substream of data, has been shown to have good performance and simple encoding and decoding. Yet V-BLAST suffers from its inability to work with fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas-this deficiency is especially important for modern cellular systems, where a base station typically has more antennas than the mobile handsets. Furthermore, because V-BLAST transmits independent data streams on its antennas there is no built-in spatial coding to guard against deep fades from any given transmit antenna. On the other hand, there are many previously proposed space-time codes that have good fading resistance and simple decoding, but these codes generally have poor performance at high data rates or with many antennas. We propose a high-rate coding scheme that can handle any configuration of transmit and receive antennas and that subsumes both V-BLAST and many proposed space-time block codes as special cases. The scheme transmits substreams of data in linear combinations over space and time. The codes are designed to optimize the mutual information between the transmitted and received signals. Because of their linear structure, the codes retain the decoding simplicity of V-BLAST, and because of their information-theoretic optimality, they possess many coding advantages. We give examples of the codes and show that their performance is generally superior to earlier proposed methods over a wide range of rates and signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)

Asymptotically-Optimal, Fast-Decodable, Full-Diversity STBCs

For a family/sequence of STBCs $\mathcal{C}_1,\mathcal{C}_2,\dots$, with increasing number of transmit antennas $N_i$, with rates $R_i$ complex symbols per channel use (cspcu), the asymptotic normalized rate is defined as $\lim_{i \to \infty}{\frac{R_i}{N_i}}$. A family of STBCs is said to be asymptotically-good if the asymptotic normalized rate is non-zero, i.e., when the rate scales as a non-zero fraction of the number of transmit antennas, and the family of STBCs is said to be asymptotically-optimal if the asymptotic normalized rate is 1, which is the maximum possible value. In this paper, we construct a new class of full-diversity STBCs that have the least ML decoding complexity among all known codes for any number of transmit antennas $N>1$ and rates $R>1$ cspcu. For a large set of $\left(R,N\right)$ pairs, the new codes have lower ML decoding complexity than the codes already available in the literature. Among the new codes, the class of full-rate codes ($R=N$) are asymptotically-optimal and fast-decodable, and for $N>5$ have lower ML decoding complexity than all other families of asymptotically-optimal, fast-decodable, full-diversity STBCs available in the literature. The construction of the new STBCs is facilitated by the following further contributions of this paper:(i) For $g > 1$, we construct $g$-group ML-decodable codes with rates greater than one cspcu. These codes are asymptotically-good too. For $g>2$, these are the first instances of $g$-group ML-decodable codes with rates greater than $1$ cspcu presented in the literature. (ii) We construct a new class of fast-group-decodable codes for all even number of transmit antennas and rates $1 < R \leq 5/4$.(iii) Given a design with full-rank linear dispersion matrices, we show that a full-diversity STBC can be constructed from this design by encoding the real symbols independently using only regular PAM constellations.Comment: 16 pages, 3 tables. The title has been changed.The class of asymptotically-good multigroup ML decodable codes has been extended to a broader class of number of antennas. New fast-group-decodable codes and asymptotically-optimal, fast-decodable codes have been include

Generalized Silver Codes

For an $n_t$ transmit, $n_r$ receive antenna system ($n_t \times n_r$ system), a {\it{full-rate}} space time block code (STBC) transmits $n_{min} = min(n_t,n_r)$ complex symbols per channel use. The well known Golden code is an example of a full-rate, full-diversity STBC for 2 transmit antennas. Its ML-decoding complexity is of the order of $M^{2.5}$ for square $M$-QAM. The Silver code for 2 transmit antennas has all the desirable properties of the Golden code except its coding gain, but offers lower ML-decoding complexity of the order of $M^2$. Importantly, the slight loss in coding gain is negligible compared to the advantage it offers in terms of lowering the ML-decoding complexity. For higher number of transmit antennas, the best known codes are the Perfect codes, which are full-rate, full-diversity, information lossless codes (for $n_r \geq n_t$) but have a high ML-decoding complexity of the order of $M^{n_tn_{min}}$ (for $n_r < n_t$, the punctured Perfect codes are considered). In this paper, a scheme to obtain full-rate STBCs for $2^a$ transmit antennas and any $n_r$ with reduced ML-decoding complexity of the order of $M^{n_t(n_{min}-(3/4))-0.5}$, is presented. The codes constructed are also information lossless for $n_r \geq n_t$, like the Perfect codes and allow higher mutual information than the comparable punctured Perfect codes for $n_r < n_t$. These codes are referred to as the {\it generalized Silver codes}, since they enjoy the same desirable properties as the comparable Perfect codes (except possibly the coding gain) with lower ML-decoding complexity, analogous to the Silver-Golden codes for 2 transmit antennas. Simulation results of the symbol error rates for 4 and 8 transmit antennas show that the generalized Silver codes match the punctured Perfect codes in error performance while offering lower ML-decoding complexity.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. This revised version has 30 pages, 7 figures and Section III has been completely revise

Full Rate L2-Orthogonal Space-Time CPM for Three Antennas

To combine the power efficiency of Continuous Phase Modulation (CPM) with enhanced performance in fading environments, some authors have suggested to use CPM in combination with Space-Time Codes (STC). Recently, we have proposed a CPM ST-coding scheme based on L2-orthogonality for two transmitting antennas. In this paper we extend this approach to the three antennas case. We analytically derive a family of coding schemes which we call Parallel Code (PC). This code family has full rate and we prove that the proposed coding scheme achieves full diversity as confirmed by accompanying simulations. We detail an example of the proposed ST codes that can be interpreted as a conventional CPM scheme with different alphabet sets for the different transmit antennas which results in a simplified implementation. Thanks to L2-orthogonality, the decoding complexity, usually exponentially proportional to the number of transmitting antennas, is reduced to linear complexity

A Novel Construction of Multi-group Decodable Space-Time Block Codes

Complex Orthogonal Design (COD) codes are known to have the lowest detection complexity among Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs). However, the rate of square COD codes decreases exponentially with the number of transmit antennas. The Quasi-Orthogonal Design (QOD) codes emerged to provide a compromise between rate and complexity as they offer higher rates compared to COD codes at the expense of an increase of decoding complexity through partially relaxing the orthogonality conditions. The QOD codes were then generalized with the so called g-symbol and g-group decodable STBCs where the number of orthogonal groups of symbols is no longer restricted to two as in the QOD case. However, the adopted approach for the construction of such codes is based on sufficient but not necessary conditions which may limit the achievable rates for any number of orthogonal groups. In this paper, we limit ourselves to the case of Unitary Weight (UW)-g-group decodable STBCs for 2^a transmit antennas where the weight matrices are required to be single thread matrices with non-zero entries in {1,-1,j,-j} and address the problem of finding the highest achievable rate for any number of orthogonal groups. This special type of weight matrices guarantees full symbol-wise diversity and subsumes a wide range of existing codes in the literature. We show that in this case an exhaustive search can be applied to find the maximum achievable rates for UW-g-group decodable STBCs with g>1. For this purpose, we extend our previously proposed approach for constructing UW-2-group decodable STBCs based on necessary and sufficient conditions to the case of UW-g-group decodable STBCs in a recursive manner.Comment: 12 pages, and 5 tables, accepted for publication in IEEE transactions on communication