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

Four-Group Decodable Space-Time Block Codes

Two new rate-one full-diversity space-time block codes (STBC) are proposed. They are characterized by the \emph{lowest decoding complexity} among the known rate-one STBC, arising due to the complete separability of the transmitted symbols into four groups for maximum likelihood detection. The first and the second codes are delay-optimal if the number of transmit antennas is a power of 2 and even, respectively. The exact pair-wise error probability is derived to allow for the performance optimization of the two codes. Compared with existing low-decoding complexity STBC, the two new codes offer several advantages such as higher code rate, lower encoding/decoding delay and complexity, lower peak-to-average power ratio, and better performance.Comment: 1 figure. Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. on Signal Processin

A Fast Decodable Full-Rate STBC with High Coding Gain for 4x2 MIMO Systems

In this work, a new fast-decodable space-time block code (STBC) is proposed. The code is full-rate and full-diversity for 4x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Due to the unique structure of the codeword, the proposed code requires a much lower computational complexity to provide maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding performance. It is shown that the ML decoding complexity is only O(M^{4.5}) when M-ary square QAM constellation is used. Finally, the proposed code has highest minimum determinant among the fast-decodable STBCs known in the literature. Simulation results prove that the proposed code provides the best bit error rate (BER) performance among the state-of-the-art STBCs.Comment: 2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), London : United Kingdom (2013

Achieving Low-Complexity Maximum-Likelihood Detection for the 3D MIMO Code

The 3D MIMO code is a robust and efficient space-time block code (STBC) for the distributed MIMO broadcasting but suffers from high maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding complexity. In this paper, we first analyze some properties of the 3D MIMO code to show that the 3D MIMO code is fast-decodable. It is proved that the ML decoding performance can be achieved with a complexity of O(M^{4.5}) instead of O(M^8) in quasi static channel with M-ary square QAM modulations. Consequently, we propose a simplified ML decoder exploiting the unique properties of 3D MIMO code. Simulation results show that the proposed simplified ML decoder can achieve much lower processing time latency compared to the classical sphere decoder with Schnorr-Euchner enumeration

A New Low-Complexity Decodable Rate-1 Full-Diversity 4 x 4 STBC with Nonvanishing Determinants

Space-time coding techniques have become common-place in wireless communication standards as they provide an effective way to mitigate the fading phenomena inherent in wireless channels. However, the use of Space-Time Block Codes (STBCs) increases significantly the optimal detection complexity at the receiver unless the low complexity decodability property is taken into consideration in the STBC design. In this letter we propose a new low-complexity decodable rate-1 full-diversity 4 x 4 STBC. We provide an analytical proof that the proposed code has the Non-Vanishing-Determinant (NVD) property, a property that can be exploited through the use of adaptive modulation which changes the transmission rate according to the wireless channel quality. We compare the proposed code to existing low-complexity decodable rate-1 full-diversity 4 x 4 STBCs in terms of performance over quasi-static Rayleigh fading channels, detection complexity and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). Our code is found to provide the best performance and the smallest PAPR which is that of the used QAM constellation at the expense of a slight increase in detection complexity w.r.t. certain previous codes but this will only penalize the proposed code for high-order QAM constellations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, and 1 table; IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 10, No. 8, AUGUST 201