Three-transmit-antenna space-time codes based on SU(3)

Fully diverse constellations, i.e., a set of unitary matrices whose pairwise differences are nonsingular, are useful in multiantenna communications especially in multiantenna differential modulation, since they have good pairwise error properties. Recently, group theoretic ideas, especially fixed-point-free (fpf) groups, have been used to design fully diverse constellations of unitary matrices. Here, we give systematic design methods of space-time codes which are appropriate for three-transmit-antenna differential modulation. The structures of the codes are motivated by the special unitary Lie group SU(3). One of the codes, which is called the AB code, has a fast maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding algorithm using complex sphere decoding. Diversity products of the codes can be easily calculated, and simulated performance shows that they are better than group-based codes, especially at high rates and as good as the elaborately designed nongroup code

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

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)

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

Code diversity in multiple antenna wireless communication

The standard approach to the design of individual space-time codes is based on optimizing diversity and coding gains. This geometric approach leads to remarkable examples, such as perfect space-time block codes, for which the complexity of Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding is considerable. Code diversity is an alternative and complementary approach where a small number of feedback bits are used to select from a family of space-time codes. Different codes lead to different induced channels at the receiver, where Channel State Information (CSI) is used to instruct the transmitter how to choose the code. This method of feedback provides gains associated with beamforming while minimizing the number of feedback bits. It complements the standard approach to code design by taking advantage of different (possibly equivalent) realizations of a particular code design. Feedback can be combined with sub-optimal low complexity decoding of the component codes to match ML decoding performance of any individual code in the family. It can also be combined with ML decoding of the component codes to improve performance beyond ML decoding performance of any individual code. One method of implementing code diversity is the use of feedback to adapt the phase of a transmitted signal as shown for 4 by 4 Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time Block Code (QOSTBC) and multi-user detection using the Alamouti code. Code diversity implemented by selecting from equivalent variants is used to improve ML decoding performance of the Golden code. This paper introduces a family of full rate circulant codes which can be linearly decoded by fourier decomposition of circulant matrices within the code diversity framework. A 3 by 3 circulant code is shown to outperform the Alamouti code at the same transmission rate.Comment: 9 page