Adaptive Time-Frequency Spreading of Quasi-Orthogonal Block Codes for MIMO-OFDM Systems

This paper describes a novel low complexity time-frequency spreading of orthogonal block codes for MIMO-OFDM systems in highly time and frequency selective channels. The space-time codes (STC) and space-frequency codes (SFC) proposed in literature for MIMO-OFDM systems require a quasi-static channel, where the channel is assumed to be constant over a number of OFDM time symbols or OFDM subcarriers. In orthogonal block codes (OBC) this is equal to the number of transmit antennas Nt employed. For higher order space-diversity systems with Nt ≥ 4, it is likely that the assumption of constant channel within the OBC to be violated in fast fading channels resulting performance degradation. We propose an adaptive time-frequency spreading strategy that minimizes the decoding error rate in different types of fading channels. The adaptation technique incorporated is based on a fading interference matric, which is evaluated at the transmitter using channel fading statistics. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive time-frequency spreading of OBCs.