Precoded MDC-STBC scheme with half-symbol decodable receiver

It is well known that Space-Time Block Codes from orthogonal designs (O-STBC) are linearly Maximum-Likelihood (ML) decodable. However there are not full rate complex O-STBC designs except for two transmit-antennas. Recently, one class of minimum-decoding-complexity STBCs (MDC-STBC) have been studied: (1) they have higher rate than O-STBC; (2) they are single-symbol decodable (SSD) and (3) they can exploit full diversity by constellation rotation (CR). In this paper, we employ precoding technology for these MDC-STBCs to realize: higher-rate, full-diversity, maximum coding gain and half-symbol decodable (HSD), where HSD has the lower complexity than SSD. Simulation results for MDC-STBCs with 4 transmit antennas show that the proposed precoder scheme with HSD decoder can get the same diversity gain and an extra 1dB coding gain than the schemes with CR, only at the cost of 3 bits feedback information for quantifying the precoder.