A combination of Alamouti code and beamforming technologies via dual-polarized antenna array systems

In conventional design works relevant to antennae transmission, the space-time block coding (STBC) and beamforming (BF) gains could not be achieved at the same time usually. This is mainly due to the STBC performs well under a low correlated channel environment; BF technologies, on the other hand, works efficiently when the multi-input multi-output (MIMO) channels are highly correlated. In order to boost the system performance, in this paper, we propose a novel MIMO architecture to exploit STBC, e.g. Alamouti code, and BF technologies simultaneously. The antenna array systems associated with polarization have potential to obtain gains for both techniques because the cross-branch links in the system usually are not correlated; and the cross-array links could be highly correlated by setting a small array element distance, i.e. equal to or less than a half-wavelength. Finally, the efficiency of our proposed architecture is validated via computer simulations.