Equalization concepts for Alamouti´s space-time block code

In this paper, we develop receiver concepts for transmission with space-time block codes (STBCs) over frequency-selective fading channels. The focus lies on Alamouti´s space-time block-coding scheme, but the results may be generalized to other STBCs as well. We show that a straightforward combination of conventional equalizers and a space-time block decoder is only possible if at least as many receive antennas as transmit antennas are employed, but not for the practically interesting case of pure transmit diversity, for which space-time coding had been originally developed. This restriction is circumvented by our approach. Here, the structural properties of the transmit signal of space-time block coding, which is shown to be improper (rotationally variant), are fully used. For this, equalizers with widely linear (WL) processing are designed, such as a WL equalizer, a decision-feedback equalizer with WL feedforward and feedback filtering, and a delayed decision-feedback sequence estimator with WL prefiltering. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed concepts may be successfully employed in an enhanced data rates for GSM evolution (EDGE) receiver, especially for pure transmit diversity. Here, significant gains can be observed, compared with a conventional single-input single-output transmission.