Construction and analysis of a new quaternionic space-time code for 4 transmit antennas

We present a novel full-rate full-diversity orthogonal space-time block code for QPSK modulation and 4 transmit antennas based on quaternionic algebra. The code does not result in constellation expansion unlike other full-rate full-diversity codes in the literature. The quaternionic structure of the code is exploited to reduce the complexity of maximum likelihood (ML) coherent decoding from a size-256 search to a size-16 search. Furthermore, we show how to modify this low-complexity coherent ML decoding rule to derive a non-coherent differential ML decoding rule. Due to the orthogonality of the code, ML differential decoding results in the minimum SNR loss of 3 dB from coherent ML decoding. Finally, extensive simulation results in a WiMAX 802.16 broadband wireless access environment demonstrate that the proposed code increases the cell coverage area by 1.5 and 2.6 folds compared to single-antenna transmission at $10^{−3}$ bit error rate when combined with 1 and 2 receive antenna(s), respectively.

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Published 1 January 2005