Orthogonal design of unitary constellations for uncoded and trellis-coded noncoherent space-time systems

We construct unitary noncoherent space-time constellations, which can be considered as a concatenation of a training block with an orthogonal design. With a simple construction, our constellations are easy to design, enjoy full antenna diversity, allow for a simplified maximum-likelihood (ML) detector, and achieve error performance comparable to existing designs that rely on computer search. To exploit the constellation structures and improve coding gains, we further pursue a trellis-coded modulation (TCM) approach. Based on the sequence pairwise error analysis, we identify two simple parameters to quantify the asymptotic error performance, which enables us to compare among different TCM schemes or uncoded alternatives.