Space-time coding for distributed antenna arrays

Recently, there has been significant interest in employing space-time codes in a distributed fashion, where a codeword is spread across antennas at large geographical separations. In such situations, the differences in path delays between disparate transmit antennas and the receiver often requires the consideration of space-time codes that are robust to such offsets. In this paper, this problem is motivated from the application of public safety radio. The optimal receiver is derived, and a number of codes are obtained. Finally, a matched filter bound analysis and numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance gains of the derived codes relative to other approaches.