Abstract
In the context of a rich scattering environment, employing multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver provides a capacity increase that is linear in the minimum of the number of transmit and receive antennas. This seminal result of Foschini & Gans and Teletar has opened the new field of space-time communications. In this tutorial we introduce the key concepts of space-time communications, focusing on transmission in a quasistatic channel for which a good estimate of channel state information is available at the receiver but not the transmitter. Both low-latency (trellis codes) and high-latency (LDPC codes) solutions will be presented. After completing this course you should be able to develop an understanding of: Capacity potential provided by multiple antennas; Layered transmission systems such as DBLAST; Rank and determinant criteria for space-time trellis codes with good average performance in Rayleigh fading; The Alamouti construction and the theory of orthogonal designs; Universal space-time trellis codes for environments where fading is not Rayleigh; Space-time communications using LDPC codes.

Educational Course Subject Areas
Communications ,  Vehicular Technology

Keywords
Space-Time Channel ,  Wireless communication ,  Antennas ,  Transmitter ,  Receiver ,  path gains ,  Mutual Information ,  Channel Capacity ,  Rayleigh Fading Space-Time Channel ,  Outage Layering ,  Suppression ,  MMSE ,  Space-Time Block Code ,  Space-Time Trellis Code ,  Pairwise Error Probability