Space-time block codes: a capacity perspective

Space-time block codes are a remarkable modulation scheme discovered recently for the multiple antenna wireless channel. They have an elegant mathematical solution for providing full diversity over the coherent, flat-fading channel. In addition, they require extremely simple encoding and decoding. Although these codes provide full diversity at low computational costs, we show that they incur a loss in capacity because they convert the matrix channel into a scalar AWGN channel whose capacity is smaller than the true channel capacity. In this letter the loss in capacity is quantified as a function of channel rank, code rate, and number of receive antennas.

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