A pragmatic approach to space-time coding

A pragmatic approach to space-time codes (STC) over block fading channels (BFC) is proposed. The new approach consists in using common convolutional codes to obtain STC, simplifying the encoder and the decoder. It is shown that pragmatic space-time codes (P-STC) achieve good performance, similar to that of the best known STC, and that they are suitable for systems with different spectral efficiencies and fading velocity (taken into account by the BFC model). To design P-STC we propose a search algorithm based on a new formulation of the pairwise error probability and the error enumerating function for geometrically uniform STC over BFC.