Improved bootstrap decoding scheme for space time codes with imperfect channel estimation

Incomplete channel state information, resulted from imperfect channel estimation, is known to degrade the performance of space time codes based communication systems. The bootstrap decoder was suggested as an adaptive decoding scheme to mitigate the effect of decoding with erroneous channel coefficients. Never the less, the suggested algorithm requires relatively long block size which may not comply with the channel coherence time. In addition, due to the long block size, the computational load required by the bootstrap algorithm can be very high. In this work, a different implementation of the bootstrap algorithm is suggested involving the use of short orthogonal data sequences. This novel approach addresses both problems with minimal rate and performance loss.