Diversity Gains Across Line of Sight and Rich Scattering Environments from Space-Polarization-Time Codes

Space-time codes built out of Alamouti components have been adopted in wireless standards such as UMTS, IEEE 802.1 In and IEEE 802.16 where they facilitate higher data rates through multiplexing of parallel data streams and the addition of two or more antennas at the receiver that perform interference cancellation. This paper provides new theoretical insight into an algorithm for interference cancellation through a Bayesian analysis that expresses performance as a function of SNR in terms of the \´\´angles" between different space-time coded data streams. Our approach provides insights into the coupling of channel coding to spatial and polarization degrees of freedom.