Performance comparison of differential space-time signalling schemes for OFDM systems

Differential transmit diversity is an attractive alternative to its coherent counterpart, especially for multiple antenna systems where channel estimation is more difficult to attain compared to that of single antenna systems. In this paper we compare two different types of differential transmit diversity techniques for OFDM based transmissions. The first technique uses differential space-time block codes (DSTBC) from orthogonal designs and the second uses the differential cyclic delay diversity (DCDD). The results compare the bit error performance for several transmit antenna configurations. The results show that DCDD offers a very close performance to that of DSTBC, with the advantage of a simplified receiver structure.