Differential Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Frequency Trellis Codes

Two rate-one differential quasi-orthogonal space-frequency trellis codes (DQOSFTCs) for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) channels are proposed. The DQOSFTCs are systematically constructed within an OFDM symbol period, by combining unitary quasi-orthogonal trellis codes and differential modulation over the frequency domain (DF-QOSFTC) or time domain (DT-QOSFTCs). Besides multipath diversity, our DQOSFTCs achieve high-coding gain and simple decoding when the channel state information is not available at both the transmitter and the receiver. Simulation results show that our proposed codes significantly outperform the existing differential space-frequency trellis codes.