Efficient spread space-time block coding scheme in multiple antenna systems

Space-time coding is an important technique that can improve transmission performance at fading environments in mobile communication systems. In this paper, we propose a novel diversity scheme using spread spacetime block coding (SSTBC) in multiple antenna systems. At the transmitter, the primitive data are serial to parallel converted to multiple data streams, and each stream is rotated in constellation. Then Walsh codes are used to spread each symbol to all antenna space in a space-time block. The signals received from all receiver antennas are combined with the maximum ratio combining (MRC), equalized with linear equalizer to eliminate the inter-code interference and finally demodulated to recover to transmit data by using the one-symbol maximum likelihood detector. The proposed scheme does not sacrifice the spectrum efficiency meanwhile maintains the transceiver with low complexity. Owing to the transmission symbols of different transmit antennas passing through all the spatial subchannels between transceiver antenna pairs, the system obtains the partial additional space diversity gain of all spatial paths. It is also shown that the diversity gain is better than the previous space-time block coding (STBC) schemes with full transmission rate.