Optimal rotations for quasi-orthogonal STBC with two-dimensional constellations

Quasi-orthogonal space-time block codes (QSTBC) achieve full diversity by constellation rotations. Several authors have introduced optimal rotation angles, found either by computer search or by analytical derivation. However, existing analytical methods do not seem general enough to analyze optimal rotations for arbitrary constellations, and some previous results seem to conflict. We present a novel method to exactly derive the coding gain of QSTBC as a function of the rotation angle and the minimum Euclidean distance of two-dimensional constellations such as the ones carved from lattices of squares and triangles, and phase-shift keying (PSK) constellations. The upper bound of coding gain for amplitude PSK (APSK) is also obtained. We find the whole range of optimal rotations for maximizing the coding gain of QSTBC. Simulation results confirm the theoretical analysis