Embedded space-time coding for wireless broadcast with heterogeneous receivers

An embedded space-time coding method is proposed for wireless broadcast with heterogeneous receivers. In the proposed system, a transmitter sends out multi-layer source signals by encoding different layers with different space-time codes. Then, a receiver can retrieve a different amount of information depending on the number of its antennas. The receiver with only one antenna can decode only the base layer information with a low complexity, while the receiver with more antennas can retrieve more layers of information. We also investigate a differential design of the embedded space-time system, which is used when the channel state information is unknown to the receiver. Both analytic and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed system.