Linear dispersion over time and frequency

High rate linear dispersion codes (LDC) for space time channels can support arbitrary numbers of transmit and receive antennas. In contrast to the one-to-one transformations used in interleaving, these codes disperse data in linear combinations over space and time. To improve performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for wireless fading channels, this paper investigates increasing frequency and time diversity using LDC. To overcome the requirement of constant channel gains over an entire LDC time interval, a new decoding algorithm for a special subclass of LDC is proposed. The newly proposed LDC-OFDM linearly disperses data over both time and frequency, i.e., over multiple subcarriers and OFDM blocks. Simulations show the bit error rate (BER) performance of rate-one LDC-OFDM with zero padding is superior to that of uncoded OFDM with zero padding. Further, compared to uncoded OFDM, LDC-OFDM may have improved performance without increasing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR).