Concatenated Alamouti codes using multi-level modulation and symbol mapping diversity technique

Abstract

A family of space-time block codes (STBCs) for systems with even transmit antennas and any number of receive antennas is proposed. The new codeword matrix is constructed by concatenating Alamouti space-time codes to form a block diagonal matrix, and its dimension is equal to the number of transmit antennas. All Alamouti codes in the same codeword matrix have the same information; thus, full transmit diversity can be achieved over fading channels. To improve the spectral efficiency, multi-level modulations such as multi-quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) are employed. The symbol mapping diversity is then exploited between transmissions of the same information from different antennas to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance. The proposed codes outperform the diagonal algebraic space-time (DAST) codes presented by Damen [Damen et al. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2002, 48(3): 628–636] when they have the same spectral efficiency. Also, they outperform the 1/2-rate codes from complex orthogonal design. Moreover, compared to DAST codes, the proposed codes have a low decoding complexity because we only need to perform linear processing to achieve single-symbol maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding.