Optimal Polarization Diversity Gain in Dual-Polarized Antennas Using Quaternions

Over the past few decades, wireless communication aims to support high data rates and reliability and thus several techniques exploiting space, time, and polarization diversities have been used to achieve large diversity gains. Orthogonal space time block codes (OSTBC) in combination with polarization diversity promise optimal diversity gains. For dual-polarized antennas, we propose a new system model based on the quaternionic structure of the channel, which offers a way to exploit polarization diversity quite independently of other forms of diversities. Moreover, such OSTPBC achieve better throughput and provide a linear decoupled decoding solution at the receiver, which significantly reduces computational complexity.