Intrinsic ICI-Free Alamouti Coded FBMC

Applying Alamouti code to filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) is a challenging issue due to the intrinsic inter-antenna inter-carrier interference (ICI), which does not exist in Alamouti coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We propose a frequency reversal Alamouti coded scheme for FBMC. As the frequency reversal symbol arrangement in itself cannot handle the inter-antenna ICI, we carefully consider the signal structure of FBMC and specify the additional requirements to satisfy self-ICI cancellation property. Only with a simple signal modification in the transmitter and the typical Alamouti decoding in the receiver, the proposed scheme achieves ideal (ICI-free) Alamouti code performance if the fading is locally flat over the Alamouti coded block. By properly dividing the total bandwidth into multiple blocks, the proposed scheme achieves near ICI-free performance for the multi-path fading channels.