Optimal general-rank transmit beamforming technique for single-group multicasting service in modern wireless networks using STTC

In this paper, we propose a novel general-rank singlegroup multicast beamforming technique using space-time trellis coding (STTC) where a multi-antenna base station broadcasts common information to a group of single-antenna receivers. Our max-min fair (MMF) based beamforming approach extends the recently introduced concept of orthogonal space-time block codes (OSTBCs) based ranktwo beamforming approach to fully flexible general-rank beamforming. The increase of the rank of the beamforming solution is accompanied with an increased degree of freedom resulting in an optimal beamforming approach with considerable performance gains in terms of bit error rate (BER) and achievable data rate as compared to the state-of-the-art rank-one and rank-two beamforming approaches. Simulations show a substantially improved performance in terms of BER of the proposed technique as compared to the best known techniques.