Systematic space-time trellis code design for an arbitrary number of transmit antennas

The potential for a capacity increase in multi-antenna wireless communication systems has drawn considerable attention to space-time codes. In this work, we propose a systematic code construction method that jointly considers diversity advantage and coding advantage for an arbitrary number of transmit antennas and any memoryless constellation. Due to the special structure of the channel symbol difference matrix, the code construction problem is reduced to a combinatorial optimization problem and a computationally efficient suboptimal solution is proposed. The simulations show that our design procedure results in codes that outperform the ones constructed by previously existing methods. In certain cases, as much as 2-2.5 dB coding gain can be observed.