Single-Carrier Frequency-Domain Equalizer with Multi-Antenna Transmit Diversity

Single-carrier (SC) block transmission with cyclic prefix (CP) is a method with several advantages that has been incorporated into standards. This paper investigates the performance of multi-antenna SC-FDE under cyclic-delay diversity (CDD) and Alamouti signaling. Our analysis fully characterizes the diversity, showing that it depends not only on the antenna configuration and channel memory, but also on data block length and data transmission rate. Below a certain rate threshold, full diversity is available to both CDD and Alamouti signaling, while at higher rates their diversity diminishes, albeit not quite in the same way. Our analysis shows that at high rates the CDD diversity degenerates to the diversity of the SISO SC-FDE, while Alamouti signaling provides twice the diversity of SISO SC-FDE.