Impact of signal constellation expansion on the achievable diversity of pragmatic bit-interleaved space-time codes

This letter studies the effect of signal constellation expansion on the achievable diversity of pragmatic bit-interleaved space-time codes in quasistatic multiple antenna channels. Signal constellation expansion can be obtained either by increasing the size of the constellation in the complex plane or by using multidimensional linear mappings. By means of two simple constructions, we provide a comparison of the two options with message passing decoding. We show that multidimensional expansion achieves some performance advantage over complex-plane expansion at the cost of significantly higher decoding complexity and larger peak-to-average power ratio of the transmitted signals.