Differential modulation based on quasi-orthogonal codes

This paper proposes a differential modulation scheme based on quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (STBCs) when neither the transmitter nor the receiver has knowledge of the channel. A system with four transmit antennas is considered and divided into two subsystems. Each subsystem is equivalent to a system with two transmit antennas and uses differential STBC modulation. Based on the encoding and decoding for the two subsystems, the overall encoding and decoding algorithm for the original system is derived. We also compare the performance of our differential detection with that of the corresponding coherent detection in terms of achieved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a given transmission power and propose a quantitative measure to estimate the performance difference between the coherent quasi-orthogonal code and our differential detection. Furthermore, we show that our differential modulation scheme can be extended to a system with more than four transmit antennas. Compared with the existing differential modulation schemes for four and eight transmit antennas, the proposed scheme has a lower bit-error rate (BER) and provides full diversity and pair-wise decoding complexity.