Automatic design of orthogonal or near-orthogonal linear dispersive space-time block codes

This paper considers a wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system in a frequency-nonselective scenario with spatially uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel coefficients and investigates the design of linear dispersive (LD) space-time block codes. Efficient LD codes are obtained by optimizing the constituent weight matrices so that an upper bound on the union bound of the codeword error probability is minimized. Interestingly, the proposed design procedure automatically generates LD codes that either correspond to, or are close to, the well-known class of orthogonal space-time block (OSTB) codes. A theoretical analysis confirms this by proving that OSTB codes are indeed optimal, when the setup under study permits their existence. Simulation results demonstrate the excellent performance of the designed codes. In particular, the importance of the codes' near-orthogonal property is illustrated by showing that low-complexity linear equalizer techniques can be used for decoding purposes while incurring a relatively moderate performance loss compared with optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding