Achieving full spatial multiplexing and full diversity in wireless communications

It is well-known that using multiple antennas provides a substantial capacity and diversity increase for wireless communication systems. A multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technique that utilizes the channel knowledge both at the transmitter and the receiver is known as beamforming. Beamforming separates a MIMO channel into parallel subchannels. It was previously shown that uncoded beamforming achieves a diversity order of (N - S + 1)(M - S + 1) if S symbols are transmitted simultaneously for N transmit and M receive antennas. Hence, there is a significant drop in the diversity order (and performance) of the system with increased spatial multiplexing. In this paper, we introduce bit interleaved coded multiple beamforming and name the system BICMB. We provide interleaver design criteria such that the resulting system achieves full spatial multiplexing of min(N, M) and full spatial diversity of NM. Simulation results show that BICMB, due to its ability of maintaining the maximum diversity order even at full spatial multiplexing, provides substantial performance gain when compared to the best spatial multiplexing systems