Mixed-Q linear space-time codes

A new modulation method for linear space-time codes is proposed based on using constellations of different sizes for different symbols. It is shown that the proposed method significantly reduces the complexity of the sphere decoding algorithm. The complexity reduction is more pronounced in high-rate codes, where each code matrix carries a large number of symbols. We also show that the choice of constellation size provides a tradeoff between performance and complexity. Using this, some guidelines for choosing constellation size are presented. As one introduces more constellation disparity in the code, the complexity is further reduced, while the performance loss grows. Typically, a complexity reduction of one to two orders of magnitude can be achieved at the expense of about 3 dB coding gain. We suggest a simple modification in our design to reduce this loss to about 2 dB.