A family of space-time block codes for wireless communications

It is well known that the performance of the wireless communication systems can be enhanced by using multiple transmit and receive antennas, which is generally referred to as the MIMO technique, and has been incorporated into the IEEE 802.11n standard, i.e. one of the Wi-Fi systems. The MIMO technique has also been adopted by the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the 3GPP2 Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) standards. The space-time coding is a promising way to realize the gain in the wireless communications system using MIMO. The space time block code, and the orthogonal space time block code in particular have been proposed in research and implemented in practical wireless communication systems due to their low computational complexity in maximum likelihood decoding implementation. However, the code rates of the orthogonal space time block codes are usually lower than 3/4 when the number of transmit antennas is greater than two, which limit their throughput. To increase the code rate and the throughput of the orthogonal space time block code for more than two transmit antennas, a family of new space-time block codes (STBC) for 3 and 4 transmit antennas in a MIMO wireless communication system have been proposed in this Ph.D. research. These new codes are orthogonal and achieve full diversity, full rate using “Triple QPSK” modulation, which is proposed in this research. We investigated the performance of these STBCs when the channel state information (CSI) is perfectly known at the receiver. The CSI is not known to the transmitter in all of the studies in this dissertation. An analytical bound of the probability of bit error is developed and the Monte Carlo simulation is used when investigating these new STBC codes. In practical wireless communication system, the CSI is generally not available at the receiver and it is usually estimated by the receiver through the pilot signals or training signals known to the receiver. No matter what channel estimation method is used, the estimate of CSI will not match the CSI exactly and is noisy. The performance of these new STBCs using the “Triple QPSK” modulation when the estimate of the CSI is employed to detect the symbol is investigated in this dissertation. An upper bound of the bit error probability is developed when the noisy CSI is used to detect the symbols. The performance of the new STBCs using the “Triple QPSK” modulation is also evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation. When the CSI is not available to either the receiver or the transmitter, the differential encoding and decoding algorithm is applied to these new STBCs, which use the “Triple QPSK” modulation. The results showed that these orthogonal STBCs achieve full diversity full rate using ”Triple-QPSK” modulation with differential detection. This provides a means of achieving space diversity and multiplexing gain without the CSI. A new differential encoding and decoding algorithm is proposed and analyzed for STBCs with 3 transmit antennas, whose transmission matrix is not square matrix, as part of this Ph.D. research. The STBCs using this algorithm achieve full diversity the MIMO system can possibly provide.