Impact of spatial channel correlation on super quasi-orthogonal space-time trellis codes

The error performance of a new family of super quasi-orthogonal space-time trellis codes (S-QSTTCs) for four transmit antennas on correlated MIMO channels is investigated. Two slightly different designs of S-QSTTCs, namely S-QSTTCs obtained by concatenating the extended Alamouti space-time code (EAC) with a simple outer trellis code and the concatenation of the ABBA code with a simple outer trellis code are compared in detail. It is shown that EA-type and ABBA-type S-QSTTCs perform quite different on spatially correlated MIMO channels. However, a unique labelling of the trellis diagram adapted to these two super quasi-orthogonal constituent code types, results in a very similar error performance even in spatially correlated channels.