Interference rejection in systems employing transmit diversity

Space diversity methods provide excellent means for increasing the robustness against interference and noise in communication systems. This is well known for systems using multiple receive antennas and it holds for systems applying transmit diversity as well. In fact, the use of transmit diversity provide two independent means for reducing the impact of interference. Via the diversity gain and via the code rate, both related to the underlying space-time code. In this paper, we are considering the use of space diversity methods in conjunction with interference rejection combining (IRC) to mitigate the impact of interference and noise for interference limited scenarios. Transmit diversity schemes based on space-time block codes (STBC) are assumed. We elucidate the importance of taking into account the spatio-temporal correlation induced by cochannel users employing transmit diversity. A novel space-time IRC (STIRC) scheme is proposed to handle the problem. The STIRC scheme combines the simplicity of conventional IRC while taking the structure of interfering users into account. Simulation examples demonstrate significant gains compared to the use of conventional IRC.