A Rate-1 Space-Time Diversity Method for Rotated 4-QAM Constellations

Abstract

We propose a rate-1 space-time transmit diversity technique. We obtained second-order diversity by transmitting the real and imaginary parts of the symbols from two antennas. With four transmit antennas, we can add Alamouti coding to reach fourth-order transmit diversity. There is no need to detect symbols jointly in either of these applications. It is possible to use both Alamouti coding and Hadamard spreading diversity with the proposed method, thereby obtaining eighth-order (or even higher) transmit diversity. However, joint detection of the symbols is again required at this point. The proposed technique is a suitable space-frequency coding method for OFDM systems. We used computer simulations to compare our technique with the Alamouti coding, quasi-orthogonal space-time block coding (QOSTBC), and orthogonal space---time block coding (OSTBC) methods. We also compared its performance to that of Hadamard spreading diversity. Alamouti coding performs better than the proposed technique at the second order of transmit diversity, but is also limited to that order. The proposed technique performs better than OSTBC at the same order of the transmit diversity. QOSTBC performs slightly better than the proposed technique at the same order of transmit diversity. However, when all methods have the same detection complexity, the proposed technique performs better than both QOSTBC and Hadamard spreading diversity.