Space-time modulation for unknown fading

Recent theoretical and experimental work at Bell Laboratories has demonstrated that some widely accepted views about our ability to communicate across a wireless fading channel appear to be incorrect. It now seems that the effects of channel fading, rather than being harmful, can actually be beneficial to wireless communications. BLAST (Bell Labs Layered Space Time) is an example of a multiple- antenna communication link whose capacity in a fading environment grows linearly with the minimum of the number of antennas at the transmitter and receiver, with no increase in bandwidth or transmitted power. BLAST is intended to work in a quasi-stationary environment since it expects the fading coefficients between pairs of transmitter and receiver antennas to change slowly enough for the receiver to track them.