Representation theory for high-rate multiple-antenna code design

Multiple antennas can greatly increase the data rate and reliability of a wireless communication link in a fading environment, but the practical success of using multiple antennas depends crucially on our ability to design high-rate space-time constellations with low encoding and decoding complexity. It has been shown that full transmitter diversity, where the constellation is a set of unitary matrices whose differences have nonzero determinant, is a desirable property for good performance. We use the powerful theory of fixed-point-free groups and their representations to design high-rate constellations with full diversity. Furthermore, we thereby classify all full-diversity constellations that form a group, for all rates and numbers of transmitter antennas. The group structure makes the constellations especially suitable for differential modulation and low-complexity decoding algorithms. The classification also reveals that the number of different group structures with full diversity is very limited when the number of transmitter antennas is large and odd. We, therefore, also consider extensions of the constellation designs to nongroups. We conclude by showing that many of our designed constellations perform excellently on both simulated and real wireless channels

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

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

Algebraic Cayley Differential Space–Time Codes

Cayley space-time codes have been proposed as a solution for coding over noncoherent differential multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. Based on the Cayley transform that maps the space of Hermitian matrices to the manifold of unitary matrices, Cayley codes are particularly suitable for high data rate, since they have an easy encoding and can be decoded using a sphere-decoder algorithm. However, at high rate, the problem of evaluating if a Cayley code is fully diverse may become intractable, and previous work has focused instead on maximizing a mutual information criterion. The drawback of this approach is that it requires heavy optimization which depends on the number of antennas and rate. In this work, we study Cayley codes in the context of division algebras, an algebraic tool that allows to get fully diverse codes. We present an algebraic construction of fully diverse Cayley codes, and show that this approach naturally yields, without further optimization, codes that perform similarly or closely to previous unitary differential codes, including previous Cayley codes, and codes built from Lie groups

Single-Symbol ML Decodable Distributed STBCs for Partially-Coherent Cooperative Networks

Space-time block codes (STBCs) that are single-symbol decodable (SSD) in a co-located multiple antenna setting need not be SSD in a distributed cooperative communication setting. A relay network with N relays and a single source-destination pair is called a partially-coherent relay channel (PCRC) if the destination has perfect channel state information (CSI) of all the channels and the relays have only the phase information of the source-to-relay channels. In this paper, first, a new set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a STBC to be SSD for co-located multiple antenna communication is obtained. Then, this is extended to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a distributed STBC (DSTBC) to be SSD for a PCRC, by identifying the additional conditions. Using this, several SSD DSTBCs for PCRC are identified among the known classes of STBCs. It is proved that even if a SSD STBC for a co-located MIMO channel does not satisfy the additional conditions for the code to be SSD for a PCRC, single-symbol decoding of it in a PCRC gives full-diversity and only coding gain is lost. It is shown that when a DSTBC is SSD for a PCRC, then arbitrary coordinate interleaving of the in-phase and quadrature-phase components of the variables does not disturb its SSD property for PCRC. Finally, it is shown that the possibility of {\em channel phase compensation} operation at the relay nodes using partial CSI at the relays increases the possible rate of SSD DSTBCs from $\frac{2}{N}$ when the relays do not have CSI to 1/2, which is independent of N