Space-Time Trellis Code Design Based on Super Quasi-Orthogonal Block Codes With Minimum Decoding Complexity

In this letter, we propose a new family of space-time trellis codes, which are constructed by combining a super set of quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes with minimum decoding complexity with an outer multiple trellis coded modulation encoder. A systematic set-partitioning method for quadratic amplitude modulation constellations is given. The proposed scheme can be used for systems with four or more than four transmit antennas. Furthermore, its decoding complexity is low because its branch metric calculation can be implemented in a symbolwise way. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has a comparable performance as super quasi-orthogonal space-time trellis codes proposed by Jafarkhani and Hassanpour while providing a lower decoding complexity.