LDPC based differential unitary space-frequency coding for MIMO-OFDM systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel LDPC based differential unitary space-frequency coding (DUSFC) scheme for MIMO-OFDM systems when neither the transmitter nor the receiver has access to the channel state information (CSI). The new DUSFC strategy basically consists of coding across transmit antennas and OFDM tones simultaneously as well as differential modulation in the time-domain. It can fully exploit the inherent advantages provided by the multipath fading channels, resulting in a high degree of diversity. The state-of-the-art low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are concatenated with our DUSFC as channel coding to improve the bit error rate (BER) performance considerably. Owing to the maximum multipath diversity and large coding advantages, LDPC-DUSFC strongly outperforms the differential unitary space-time coded OFDM techniques recently proposed in literature. The corresponding iterative decoding algorithm without channel estimation is finally provided to offer significant performance gain. Simulation results illustrate the merits of the proposed scheme.