Space-time decoding with imperfect synchronization

In this paper we propose a new detection scheme for space-time block coded (STBC) systems over a flat Rayleigh fading channel. A detector is derived for a receiver having unknown channel state information (CSI) and carrier frequency offset (CFO). The proposed detector is based on a linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) symbol estimator. Analysis of the relative performance of the proposed detector with the conventional method is done by simulation for different modulation schemes and in the presence of multiple estimation error variances. It is shown that the proposed detector outperforms the conventional detector in terms of bit error rate (BER).