Transmit antennae space-time block coding for generalized OFDM in the presence of unknown multipath

Transmit antenna diversity has been exploited to develop high-performance space-time coders and simple maximum-likelihood decoders for transmissions over flat fading channels. Relying on block precoding, this paper develops generalized space-time coded multicarrier transceivers appropriate for wireless propagation over frequency-selective multipath channels. Multicarrier precoding maps the frequency-selective channel into a set of flat fading subchannels, whereas space-time encoding/decoding facilitates equalization and achieves performance gains by exploiting the diversity available with multiple transmit antennas. When channel state information is unknown at the receiver, it is acquired blindly based on a deterministic variant of the constant-modulus algorithm that exploits the structure of space-time block codes. To benchmark performance, the Cramer-Rao bound of the channel estimates is also derived. System performance is evaluated both analytically and with simulations.