Maximum Rate of Unitary-Weight, Single-Symbol Decodable STBCs

It is well known that the Space-time Block Codes (STBCs) from Complex orthogonal designs (CODs) are single-symbol decodable/symbol-by-symbol decodable (SSD). The weight matrices of the square CODs are all unitary and obtainable from the unitary matrix representations of Clifford Algebras when the number of transmit antennas $n$ is a power of 2. The rate of the square CODs for $n = 2^a$ has been shown to be $\frac{a+1}{2^a}$ complex symbols per channel use. However, SSD codes having unitary-weight matrices need not be CODs, an example being the Minimum-Decoding-Complexity STBCs from Quasi-Orthogonal Designs. In this paper, an achievable upper bound on the rate of any unitary-weight SSD code is derived to be $\frac{a}{2^{a-1}}$ complex symbols per channel use for $2^a$ antennas, and this upper bound is larger than that of the CODs. By way of code construction, the interrelationship between the weight matrices of unitary-weight SSD codes is studied. Also, the coding gain of all unitary-weight SSD codes is proved to be the same for QAM constellations and conditions that are necessary for unitary-weight SSD codes to achieve full transmit diversity and optimum coding gain are presented.Comment: accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 9 pages, 1 figure, 1 Tabl

Full Diversity Space-Time Block Codes with Low-Complexity Partial Interference Cancellation Group Decoding

Partial interference cancellation (PIC) group decoding proposed by Guo and Xia is an attractive low-complexity alternative to the optimal processing for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications. It can well deal with the tradeoff among rate, diversity and complexity of space-time block codes (STBC). In this paper, a systematic design of full-diversity STBC with low-complexity PIC group decoding is proposed. The proposed code design is featured as a group-orthogonal STBC by replacing every element of an Alamouti code matrix with an elementary matrix composed of multiple diagonal layers of coded symbols. With the PIC group decoding and a particular grouping scheme, the proposed STBC can achieve full diversity, a rate of $(2M)/(M+2)$ and a low-complexity decoding for $M$ transmit antennas. Simulation results show that the proposed codes can achieve the full diversity with PIC group decoding while requiring half decoding complexity of the existing codes.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

Minimum-Decoding-Complexity, Maximum-rate Space-Time Block Codes from Clifford Algebras

It is well known that Alamouti code and, in general, Space-time Block Codes (STBCs) from Complex Orthogonal Designs (CODs) are Single-symbol decodable/symbol-by-symbol Decodable (SSD) and are obtainable from unitary matrix representations of Clifford algebras. However, SSD codes are obtainable from designs that are not CODs. Recently, two such classes of SSD codes have been studied: (i) Coordinate Interleaved Orthogonal Designs (CIODs) and (ii) Minimum-decoding-complexity (MDC) STBCs from Quasi-ODs (QODs). In this paper, we obtain SSD codes with unitary weight matrices (but not CODs) from matrix representations of Clifford algebras. Moreover, we derive an upper bound on the rate of SSD codes with unitary weight matrices and show that our codes meet this bound. Also, we present conditions on the signal sets which ensure full-diversity and give expressions for the coding gain