Code Rate-Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff

Multiple antenna systems can be used to increase system reliability or to increase system capacity. Initially, space-time codes were designed to achieve one of these two types of gain. Recently, though, a tradeoff between these two system resources has been characterized by the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. Achieving this optimal performance frontier requires proper coding. For diversity optimality, the signal transmitted from each antenna must redundantly describe the message bits. This redundancy has been quantified by the rate of a space-time code, which relates space-time codebook size to constituent single-input-single-output (SISO) constellation size. Achievable diversity has also been shown to decrease with increasing rates, which establishes the diversity-rate tradeoff. In this work, we consider a generalized notion of the rate of the space-time code, which we refer to as the code rate Rc, and the associated diversity-code rate tradeoff. We then generalize the diversity-multiplexing and diversity-code rate tradeoffs and find that a new diversity-multiplexing tradeoff exists as a function of the code rate.