Super-orthogonal space-time-frequency trellis coded OFDM

Super-orthogonal space-time trellis codes (SOSTTCs) given in the literature are full rate and provide full spatial diversity with high coding gain in narrowband quasistatic fading channels. The high number of parallel transitions in their trellis structure restricts their performance in wideband channels where the code performance suffers from multipath. Code design criteria are derived and a computer search based method is proposed to design full-rate optimised SOSTTCs exploiting full spatial and multipath diversity for multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems. The proposed codes have codewords defined in space, time, and frequency. We evaluate the codeword error rates of the new 16, 32 and 64-state super-orthogonal space-time-frequency trellis codes for quadrature phase shift keying by computer simulation and show that they provide significant error performance improvement compared to their counterparts with equivalent delay length