A simple transmit scheme to exploit signal space diversity in V-BLAST system

Recently, signal space diversity (SSD) has become a hot topic. This paper presents a new transmit scheme to exploit this diversity technique in vertical Bell Labs Layered Space-Time (V-BLAST). Using N (N = 2, 4, …) transmit antennas and N receive antennas this simple scheme provides rate N times over the original scheme with one transmit antenna and one receive antenna. Over Rayleigh fading channel, the advantage of SSD can be exploited to the greatest extent. In our new scheme, some fading channels, such as Ricean fading channel can be treated as Rayleigh fading channel and then the advantage of SSD can be exploited completely. The bit error rate (BER) performance of this simple scheme is better than some other existing schemes with the same data rate.