Space-time multilevel codes

To date there has been little work done on multilevel codes for the space-time environment. In this paper we develop multi-dimensional space-time multilevel codes (ST-MLCs), which partition the 2N/sub t/-dimensional signalling space that spans all N/sub t/ transmit antennas. The partitioning is designed to reduce the complexity of detection/decoding. We also develop a space-time multistage decoder for the proposed ST-MLC. It allows the detection/decoding complexity to be significantly reduced compared to a single level approach.