Simplified receiver design for STBC binary continuous phase modulation

Existing space-time codes have focused on multiple- antenna systems with linear modulation schemes such as phase- shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Continuous phase modulation (CPM) is an attractive scheme for digital transmission because of its constant envelope which is needed for power efficient transmitters. Recent research has shown that space-time coded CPM can achieve transmit diversity to improve performance while maintaining the compact spectrum of CPM signals. However, these efforts mainly combine space- time coding (STC) with CPM to achieve spatial diversity at the cost of a high decoding complexity. In this paper, we design space-time block codes (STBC) for binary CPM with modulation index h = 1/2 and derive low-complexity receivers for these systems. The proposed scheme has a much lower decoding complexity than STC CPM with the Viterbi decoder and still achieves near-optimum error performances.