Blind recognition of linear space time block codes

The blind recognition of communication parameters is a key research issue for commercial and military communication systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of the blind recognition of linear space-time block codes (STBC). To characterize the space time coding, we propose to compute a time-lag correlation of the received samples. Provided the number of transmitters, the noise variance and the symbol timing are well estimated, we show that the theoretical values of the correlation norm only depend on the STBC and are affected by neither the channel nor the symbol modulation. The automatic recognition of the STBC is realized by selecting the STBC which minimizes the distance between the theoretical values and the experimental ones. Simulations show that our method performs well even for low signal to noise ratio (0 dB).