Linear space-time coding at full rate and full diversity

The use of multiple transmitter and receiver antennas allows to transmit multiple signal substreams in parallel and hence to increase communication capacity. In order to distribute the multiple signal substreams over the MIMO channel, linear spacetime codes have been shown to be a convenient way to reach high capacity gains with a reasonable complexity. The space-time codes that have been introduced so far are block codes, leading to the manipulation of possibly large matrices. To reduce complexity, this work introduces convolutive codes, associated with MIMO filters. The proposed approach also constitutes an alternative to OFDM based approaches for frequency fading channels.