Frequency-Domain Equalization for Single-Carrier SFBC Diversity in a Frequency-Selective Fading

In a high mobility environment, single-carrier (SC) space-frequency block coding (SFBC) diversity achieves better bit error rate (BER) performance than SC space-time block coding (STBC) diversity. However, in a strong frequency-selective fading channel, the BER performance degrades due to the orthogonality distortion of SFBC codeword. In this paper, we propose a fre-quency-domain equalization (called robust FDE) suitable for SC-SFBC diversity in a frequency-selective fading. The robust FDE weights are jointly optimized based on minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion taking into account channel variation within a SFBC codeword caused by frequency-selective fading. It is shown by computer simulation that proposed robust FDE al-ways achieves BER performance superior to conventional FDE whose weights are determined without considering the channel frequency variation within a SFBC codeword.