A new family of full-diversity space-time block codes

This paper proposes a new family of full-diversity space-time block codes whose transmission rate are 2 symbols per channel use for four transmit antennas, named ABCD code. The new code combines the structure characteristics of the Alamouti code and the threaded algebraic space-time block code (TASTBC). It will show that the new code has larger second-order mutual information than the existing space-time block codes, which guarantees a superior performance at low SNR. Because of full transmit diversity, it also provides a good performance at high SNR.