Unit-rate and Low-complexity Space-time Block Coding for Multiple Antennas

Space-time block coding (STBC) has been an effective transmit diversity technique for combating fading due to its orthogonal design, simple decoding and high diversity gains. In this paper, a unit-rate and low-complexity STBC scheme for multiple antennas is proposed, and turbo coding is employed as channel coding to improve the proposed code scheme performance further. Compared with full-diversity multiple antennas STBC schemes, the proposed scheme can implement unit rate, complex orthogonality and partial diversity; and under the same system throughput, it has much smaller computational complexity. Moreover, using the proposed scheme can form efficient spatial interleaving, thus the performance loss due to partial diversity is effectively compensated by the concatenation of turbo coding. Simulation results show that on the condition of the same system throughput and concatenation of turbo coding, the proposed scheme has lower BER than those low-rate and full-diversity multiple antennas STBC schemes.