On the Design of 2x2 Full-Rate Full-Diversity Space-Time Block Codes

There has been considerable research on the design of space-time block codes (STBCs) that guarantee full diversity without sacrificing the data rate. The main challenge is to maximize the coding gain by maximizing the determinant criterion. It is shown that the most of previous STBCs with full rate and full diversity order (FRFD) (e.g. threaded algebraic space-time (TAST) codes) are constructed via a unitary generator matrix. However, the unitary matrix has been represented using only a small number parameters to enable algebraic code design. In this paper, for a 2 times 2 STBC, we use a more general unitary matrix with a large number of parameters for STBC design. We obtain an upper bound on the coding gain and show that the maximum coding gain is attainable only with PAM signaling. Since optimum parameters for the case of QAM signaling is analytically intractable, we search using the genetic algorithm (GA) method. We also use the union bound criterion for code parameter search by GA. Our simulation results show that with both criteria, the optimum code for QAM signaling is the Golden code. The proposed code significantly outperforms other existing STBCs with the gains about 2 dB at a symbol error rate of 10 for BPSK and 4-PAM. The proposed code performs identically to the Golden code for QAM.